Every school system should define which employee travel expenses are reimbursed, and how employees go about being reimbursed for expenses including mileage. In many cases, travel to training programs and conferences is a reimbursable expense, as long as the employee logs mileage and expenses accurately.
By streamlining the mileage reimbursement process, a school system can reduce errors in the reimbursement process and cut the costs involved with processing mileage reimbursement requests. Hand-delivering paper forms to approving authorities wastes time, and paper forms, unlike electronic forms, can be lost or damaged, resulting in even greater expense. Here are some ways you can make the mileage reimbursement process for your K-12 system sleek and efficient. Offer Convenient Mileage Tracking Options Writing down the beginning and ending mileage is no longer the only way to track mileage. Some school systems designate mileage amounts between cities, and others may require actual mileage to be tracked. Fortunately, iPhone and Android apps are freely available to track mileage so your personnel do not have to write it down. Another way of tracking mileage is using Google Maps and recreating the route. School districts may stipulate that if the administration calculates mileage for an employee using Google Maps, the shortest route is chosen by default. The more convenient you make mileage tracking, the more efficient the mileage reimbursement process is. A Mileage Matrix Helps Those Who Regularly Travel Between Schools If your district has teachers who regularly travel from one school to the next, using Google Maps to create a mileage matrix between schools can make it easy to keep track of mileage for reimbursement. In many school systems, specialists like speech therapists and teachers of specialized subjects like art, band, and choir are shared among several schools. Creating a mileage matrix that can be printed out (or displayed on a tablet) allows for quick, accurate documentation for mileage reimbursement purposes. Don't Bog Down the Process With Paper Forms So many things can go wrong with paper mileage reimbursement forms. If the blanks are too small, information can be unreadable. Paper is subject to being ripped, coffee-stained, and being lost altogether, resulting in a lot of duplicated effort and waste [caption id="" align="alignright" width="400"]
