Keys to Success for Personalized Mileage Reimbursement

Expense management is one of the top line items costing companies and impacting their bottom line. When the cost of one-size-fits-all approaches to expense management stop proving ROI to the business, companies need a replacement. In fact, they’re pushing business leaders to find new solutions that lower costs and create efficiencies in the process.

Personalized Reimbursements?

For companies actively involved in cost savings initiatives, mileage reimbursement should be the next area of focus to uncover hidden costs. Personalized mileage reimbursement solutions — rather than one-size-fits-all approaches — have proven to reduce costs and improve processes. Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario.

A retail company provides its employees with the average car allowance amount. At around $500, the business hopes its driving employees can pay for gas without issue. Now, a direct competitor with almost an identical business and the same number of driving employees is only different in one way: their vehicle program. They’ve decided on a personalized reimbursement, one that pays employees for the miles they’ve driven in the area they live. As it happens, this company is saving money by paying employees a fair and accurate reimbursement, specific to the miles they’ve driven.

Benefiting the Bottom Line

Every company and industry is different, but generally savings from mileage reimbursement are significant enough to reduce the overall T&E spend for a business. There’s more benefit in this result than a happy CFO. By reducing T&E costs, companies can re-allocate that budget, investing in other areas of the business.

In addition to discovering cost savings, companies who implement personalized mileage reimbursement solutions create more efficient processes. Leveraging a technology platform to reimburse all business expenses — including mileage — automates processes and uncovers time savings for the employees and their managers. For example, having a fully connected platform for expense reimbursement simplifies the invoice process and provides more visibility into spend in real-time.

Streamlining with Technology

Reimbursing mileage based on the exact cost of driving for business – specific to the individual, location and vehicle – is the next frontier for reducing T&E expenses for businesses. Technology offers business leaders a way of calculating these exact costs while streamlining the submission and reimbursement process. Using technology with a personalized mileage reimbursement approach allows companies to save time and money – proving ROI much faster than one-size-fits-all approaches.

Making the Switch

How do businesses make the switch from a one-size-fits-all approach to personalized reimbursements? Technology solutions offer the necessary elements to introduce a personalized mileage reimbursement process. For example, cloud-based technology platforms allow for real-time data for things like gas prices across different regions. This gives companies the information needed to calculate both the fixed and variable costs of driving for business – personalized mileage reimbursement. Another example is automating the mileage submission process for employees to easily submit their mileage for approval.

Interested in learning more about the keys to success for personalized mileage reimbursement? Check out our guide, Variations in Mileage Reimbursement Programs: What You Need to Know.

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