How Lyft Creates Smarter Travel Policies for a Culture-First Company

As Lyft has grown into a large, global company providing amazing ride share transportation options, TripActions has been there along for the ride to ensure their corporate travelers get to where they need to be. Learn how Lyft uses TripActions to take the hassle out of business travel.

Lyft is a publicly traded ridesharing company based in San Francisco with thousands of employees across North America. At this scale, their team needed a way to balance administrative compliance with efficiency and TripActions Liquid™ was the perfect end to end solution for this.

Read on to learn more.

Challenges

Maintaining compliance while promoting efficiency
Processes and tools required heavy manual intervention
Employee pain around expense reports

Results with TripActions

Travel expense reconciliation process accelerated for the reimbursement and accounting team
5 hours of manual work saved per week, per procurement analyst
Eliminated travel expense reports and boosted employee sentiment

Trip-Activated Corporate Cards

As Procurement Travel and Expense Analyst, Jasmine Pope’s team mission at Lyft is to optimize transparency, compliance, and flexibility across the company. T&E is a big part of that, which is why they are always looking for innovative solutions and partners that align with Lyft’s goals.

“As a public company, we strive to comply with all SEC regulations, but we don’t want to be too bureaucratic and cause dissatisfaction among business operations, supplier relationships, and with our employees,” Jasmine said. “Our Procurement team encourages new technologies and to be a game changer — not to just maintain the status quo.”

Accelerating Expense Reconciliation

With expense management systems, reconciliation requires a lot of manual work, especially for expense reports. With TripActions Liquid, reconciliation is simple and instantaneous. “Because TripActions Liquid automatically organizes receipts by general ledger account category, department, or cost center, we’re able to accelerate the reconciliation process of those expenses at least six times faster than the usual process of working with an expense management tool,” Jasmine explained.

T&E Technology = Time Savings

“My team is getting at least five hours of their week back because of TripActions Liquid. Everything is already in compliance, and items don’t need to go through robust reviews like before,” Jasmine said. “We can now focus our efforts on higher value activities, whether it’s complexities relating to accounts payable or accounts receivable, correcting general ledger statements, or putting more thought into priority efforts.”

Something that resonates deeply within Lyft’s culture is how to think about technology. The team values being at the forefront of innovation instead of taking a traditional approach to how things are done. TripActions Liquid enables Jasmine and her team to focus on strategic initiatives, minimizing time wasted on manual reconciliation and travel expense monitoring, so they can instead focus on how Lyft’s travel spending contributes to the company’s growth.

“My team doesn’t have to monitor expenses with a fine-toothed comb because we are in control of the policies that dictate how the product works. We set up policy guardrails and let TripActions Liquid do the work, knowing the cards are integrated with technology we trust.”

Jasmine Pope, Procurement Travel & Expense Analyst, Lyft