Motus: Accurate Mileage Reimbursement

The Global Business Travel Association estimates that 1.3 million business trips occur every day in the U.S.–an estimated total of 488 million annually. Of those, many are relatively short distances, leading the overwhelming majority of business travelers today–48 percent according to the U.S. Travel Association–drive their personal vehicles for business trips, as opposed to other travel methods such as flying, traveling by train or renting a car. These business drivers are not truckers nor are they jet-setting travelers that can expense their trips based on receipts; they are drivers who drive non-specialty vehicles for work. And employers are encountering new challenges when it comes to accurately reimbursing them for the business use of their personally-owned vehicle. The problem is that the reimbursement process has remained surprisingly analog to date, relying largely on manual mileage logs and data entry. This has led to both intentional and accidental fraud, productivity losses with increased administrative work, and in some instances, even multi-million dollar lawsuits when employers fail to comply with stringent and complex labor regulations across various jurisdictions.

To alleviate these painpoints, Boston, MA-based Motus is bringing advanced technology into the mileage reimbursement space, enabling employers to reimburse their business drivers fairly and accurately, based on actual costs related to the business usage of their personal vehicles.

Organizations struggle to capture the actual costs of owning and operating a vehicle for individual drivers, which includes everything from insurance, license and registration fees, taxes and vehicle depreciation, as well as gas, oil, maintenance and tire wear. These costs vary from location to location and are also affected by individual factors such as a driver’s age, type of vehicle they operate and the number of miles they drive. Motus’ cloud-based, mobile enterprise platform makes mileage tracking more precise and streamlines expense reporting and processing, while ensuring compliance. “Our sophisticated business rules engine processes a tremendous amount of real-time data and considers more than 150 different variables, informing more than 300 settings, to calculate an individualized reimbursement rate, based on where a driver lives and the number of miles they drive,” says Motus’ President and CEO Craig Powell.