Business mileage is the largest expense type for small businesses in the UK, with over 2 million employees making mileage claims annually.
However, most still use spreadsheets and log books to manually track mileage, which can be an arduous and time consuming task, distracting your employees from their day to day jobs.
Thankfully in this digital day and age, companies are starting to turn their heads away from these outdated methods and instead investing in technologies to do it for them.
One of these new technologies is automatic mileage tracking, which can help businesses to eliminate the hassle of mileage claims whilst significantly reducing travel costs.
Here are the key benefits of using an automatic system for managing your business mileage:
- It’s accurate
If your staff have a busy work schedule, then the accuracy of your business miles will rank as a low priority, and it’s one of the main reasons why 89% of all drivers submit inaccurate mileage claims.
Moreover, manual methods are likely to lead to employees rounding up or over inflating their mileage at times, due to the difficulty of recording countless journeys, making it even more relevant to the business to ensure accurate mileage tracking.
- It’s time saving
On average, each employee spends 6 minutes per day logging their mileage in spreadsheets or log books, which could stretch to over 3 working days annually. This is a long time to focus on mileage alone.
Businesses also need to consider the additional time managers spend on reviewing all of these claims, which can take more time than logging the mileage itself.
The right fleet mileage tracking technology can simplify the whole review process to just a few minutes per month, allowing your team to spend more time on what really matters.
- It’s HMRC compliant
It’s estimated that 93% of SMEs would fail a HMRC mileage inspection, as records must be kept adequately for up to 6 years, and that’s why automatic mileage tracking systems record and store every trip automatically after they happen.
Also, most solutions store the logs safely in the cloud, which would prevent any records from being lost, which happens quite often due to misplacement of log books or technology issues such as computers crashing, updates to the company’s IT system, etc.
- It’s tax efficient
HMRC sets recommended mileage rates which employers can use to reimburse employees for their business trips. If your business uses these rates or lower, HMRC will accept there’s no tax to be paid as long as you record all business miles driven, for which you would need a reliable tracking system.
Also, you can use such a system to automatically calculate the VAT amount that you can claim back on your fuel spend. A report published by the government in 2018 states that only 180,000 recipients claimed VAT on car fuel in 2016/ 17, which shows that many businesses are still not benefiting from this type of tax deduction.
How can I start tracking mileage automatically?
Today, there are new automatic mileage tracking solutions such as Autotrip which can help your business save time and money managing mileage expenses.
Instead of logging mileage manually, drivers can fit a plug & play tracker into their cars, which runs in the background and captures every mile driven. This leaves less room for over-exaggerated claims and human error, whilst also ensuring HMRC compliance.
Together with the tracker, drivers have access to an app where they classify trips as business or private trips (visible only to them to respect their privacy).
Automatic mileage tracking solutions make life easy for businesses as well: claims can quickly be reviewed and are safely stored in the cloud so you can keep all of the relevant info in one single place.
Ultimately, these are productivity tools that can make mobile workforces more efficient, helping drivers to stop wasting time on mundane tasks and focus on the things that matter to the business..
