As ridesharing has grown from a novel idea into acceptable ground transportation for businesses , we’ve seen first-hand the rise in our customers using Uber. For the time-poor traveller getting from A to B has never been easier. There’s a cool app, almost always a car around the corner and it’s usually cheaper.
But like everything in life, there are pros and cons, and for companies using Uber for business there are some hidden costs to think about….
It’s almost too easy! For some of our clients they’ve seen their taxi spend actually increase with personal trips flying under the radar. Yes, we know there is a personal profile in Uber, but is it always used?
Yes it’s an e-receipt, but the ‘e’ is not for easy. The trip receipt is conveniently emailed to the rider but what do they do with it then? It will still need to be attached to an expense report and that’s a task in itself. 1. Email, 2.convert to PDF and 3. upload.
And who’s checking? For companies on the Uber for Business account those trips can’t be routed to an approver so there is no accountability or visibility. And if the taxi trip has to be allocated to a project or on-charged, then breaking down the data becomes a manual task to be undertaken by the already time-poor finance team.
With our innovative digital receipt service we deliver digital receipts and data to our clients for travel, taxis, cars and hotels. And now we are delighted to announce that we have added Uber trips to this service.
Employees can now request, ride and pay using the Uber app and the digital receipt will automatically turn up in their ProSpend receipt vault.
Now that alone will save your employees a whole heap of time, but it’s what we then do with that receipt and enriched data in our expense module that is truly innovative. The entire taxi booking, approval and reconciliation process becomes seamless and totally hands-free.
Now who’s checking?
Approvers get full visibility of taxi spend. Line items information like passenger, pick up and drop off locations and times, reason for trip, project code allocations, etc are all included in every expense line. And companies can set up any type of approval workflow in ProSpend so it routes automatically to the right approver/s.
Digital receipts = happy finance team
This is game changing for finance teams. When they get the Uber statement to pay, every transaction will already be in ProSpend ready for them including a tax document. And it will have been approved, GST correct, tax invoice attached and updated with the right coding. They simply batch the transactions and export to their finance system (yes, that’s hands free too) to pay Uber.
If you have an Uber for Business account just reach out to us to enable this new digital offering.