Startup Idea: Mileage Tracking Mobile App for Small Businesses
I work as an Administrative Director for an Eco-friendly cleaning company which is a small business in my community. The business is run by two individuals, and up until taking me on the team, they were leaving it up to themselves to handle all major matters.
Now that I handle the office/clerical/HR work, I track: customer inquiry data, referrals, gift certificates, scheduling trends, etc. among other things and completing regular daily duties. The owners continue to track their own expenses, and also their transportation and mileage.
For my own mileage (for compensation), I have created a somewhat informal spreadsheet to track my personal mileage (date, beginning and end, miles driven, compensation owed (x 0.54/mi), and date paid out). I rarely need to travel for this position minus my standard commute, so the informal spreadsheet is not too daunting.
As we continue to grow and hire additional team members (cleaners), we will need a better option to track employee travel. Using such a manual method leaves far too much room for error, and it would cause legal harm to us if we ever missed a payout for mileage reimbursement as this is something we offer. While I can also gain a general sense of the correct mileage number anticipated, I am limited to Google Maps and this does not account for idling in traffic, detours, general searching for parking as we have many urban client homes, etc. I currently have no way to have a precise number on what is truly being traveled, in a way that I can be 100% certain about, as I am not in the car with the employees. I need assurance I am not paying out for extra detours they may take for personal gain.
We operate on an A/B weekly schedule; each week, one member of the team of two drives and the other takes the following week, and so on and so forth.
Software that would be useful would involve an app, so that my employees can plug in their mileage while out on the go- from destination to destination (with "check in" location on a map for verification of their honesty and timeliness), that also allows them to see their accrued mileage on a dashboard. It would allow myself/owners to access and have all of our tracking in one central place.
I would like it to keep a format where you can see daily, weekly, and monthly logs. It should have an option to back it up to desktop software or an external drive, but at a minimum, hold the log for 90 days.