How can companies optimize their cab expenses and what tools are available to do so?

JOSÉ CÁNOVAS DEL CASTILLO, founding partner of Taksee

95% of companies in Spain do not know how much they spend on cabs, so it is difficult to establish, a priori, a savings target or optimize spending. Traditionally, cab expenses, like other items in the expense statement (mileage, parking or meals), have been a "non-actionable" item, so they have received very little attention from travel managers or expense managers.

 

In some cases, there are companies that have an agreement with a local cab station that bills the company monthly for the amount of services rendered. While this is a first step in discovering the magnitude of the expense, it often has numerous limitations. First, these agreements are limited to a single city, whereas the organization often travels to multiple destinations. Second, it is common for only a portion of the employees to enjoy this service. The reason for this &em>“limited selection”selection” is due to the fact that the up to date maintenance of the  employee database (registrations, terminations, departmental changes, etc.) is still a big challenge for conventional broadcasters.

Finally, billing,reporting and quality control systems often have significant limitations for efficient expense management.

On the other hand, in recent months have appeared in the Spanish market numerous apps to book cabs from the smartphones.Basically, these apps allow replacing the traditional phone call to a station by an attractive application on the user's mobile phone that usually shows on a map our location and how the assigned cab is approaching. Additionally, they usually include an estimate of the time of arrival or even the cost of the trip. In other words, they are apps aimed at the B2C or private consumer segment.

However, these apps do not currently solve the needs of the corporate customer: multi-city coverage, multi-channel reservation system (not only app but also telephone customer service), administrative management, reporting in real time, etc.

Back to the initial question,

Are my company's cab expenses optimized?To answer with criterion it is necessary to know and analyze some basic indicators: total volume of expenditure, number of transactions, distribution among the different cities, identification of employees with higher volume, routes, days and hours in which cabs are used...

Finally, and not less important, to optimize the management of this item is essential to simplify the administrative processes, eliminating the monthly management of hundreds of paper cab tickets (with multiple formats, handwritten amounts, unknown origin and destination, …) and managed invoices that allow to deduct the corresponding VAT.