As hybrid and remote work continue to become the norm, workplace locations, habits, procedures, and policies are changing rapidly. And the tools and processes organizations use to reimburse employees for their expenses—vehicles, devices, home offices, relocation, and everything in between—may not be keeping up.
Organizations saddled with multiple legacy reimbursement providers and inefficient manual processes can struggle to keep up with fluid market conditions, emerging hybrid-workforce expectations, and ever-changing compliance demands. This may prevent leaders from making decisions that could help their companies grow. Customers notice, too, when these organizations’ competitors are better positioned to deliver what they need.
But some organizations are optimizing their resource allocation by implementing simple, flexible, scalable reimbursement and applying real-time data analytics to help them flag issues and improve data-driven decision making. Updating these processes and platforms is helping them reduce costs and maximize reimbursement spend without disruption to their workforces. Their solution is software as a service (SaaS) tools that reduce administrative burden, seamlessly surface trends, drive intelligence, ensure tax adherence, and flag compliance issues across markets and regions.
Switching to Seamlessness
One midsize delivery company relies on drivers who use their own vehicles to complete their assignments. After adopting a low-cost workforce-management system to oversee reimbursements, the company quickly found that onboarding each new driver to the platform was frequently a multi-day process that required the company to complete multiple manual administrative tasks. That was a risky scenario, as employees wouldn’t get reimbursed if any information were entered incorrectly. “The point of this solution was making sure that our drivers get reimbursed,” says an operational leader at the company, “and that wasn’t happening.”
The organization made a seamless transition to a scalable, flexible, streamlined SaaS system for reimbursement. Adding new drivers has become a simple process. All drivers are accurately enrolled and paid— “No one misses a reimbursement,” the operational leader says—and costs are down 30%.
In Louisiana, one distributor of beer and nonalcoholic beverages once provided its sales force with company vehicles. These employees had long workdays, with each visiting about 15 accounts daily, and employees were expected to take their cars home after work. Together, that activity put up to 20,000 miles on the company cars’ odometers each year.
But the company learned that drivers were hard on these fleet cars. Frequent accidents and inconsistent maintenance led to increased corporate risk and liability exposure. And company leaders believed employees undervalued their vehicle benefit.
As the organization implemented a policy shift for its employees to drive their personal vehicles rather than company cars, it implemented a reimbursement platform that quickly made ongoing program management user-friendly and easy to navigate.
The system’s provider managed all communication to launch the program on a new platform and conducted administrative duties, verifying all drivers were insured and compliant with company policy. The change also prompted a welcome cultural shift. Today, with employees driving and caring for their personal vehicles on the job, company liability is reduced significantly, and maintenance expenses are no longer an issue.
Brewing Efficiency
D.G. Yuengling & Son, the Pennsylvania stalwart that is America’s oldest brewery, had long used a mileage-tracking app to reimburse its sales employees for their travels. But its system was balky and frequently inaccurate, resulting in wasted time as sales reps manually updated their travel records.
Company leaders knew the brewer needed to upgrade its reimbursement platform, but hesitated to potentially disrupt legacy workflows without being sure a new solution would bring real improvement.
But Yuengling adopted a user-friendly, highly accurate platform that was easy to integrate with its expense-management software, freeing its sales team to focus on selling rather than entering mileage manually into a legacy system with ineffective GPS tracking. After the switch, 92% of the platform users at the brewery said the new tools saved them significant tracking and reporting mileage or helped them streamline their work and eliminate manual processes.
A New Tool for Growth
In a challenging economic environment with a stubbornly tight labor market, organizations need to make critical decisions to optimize growth, earnings, and culture while retaining their top talent. Examining and implementing your reimbursement programs can help your organization make decisions that help both your employees and your business grow.
Learn how Motus can help your organization build your reimbursement program.
