Name: From 30 to 30,000: inside Uber’s T&E playbook for businesses of any size
Uploaded: 2025-07-24T18:53:03.207Z
Duration: 35 min 12 s
Description: From 30 to 30,000: inside Uber’s T&E playbook for businesses of any size

Transcript for "From 30 to 30,000: inside Uber’s T&E playbook for businesses of any size": Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar from 30 to 30,000, putting Uber's T and E playbook to work for companies of any size. I'm Ariana, and thank you so much for joining us. If you're new to Uber for Business, we bring the best of Uber to organizations around the globe. With global scale, integrated solutions, and exceptional service, Uber for Business empowers organizations to streamline business travel, reimagine employee well-being, and elevate the customer experience, all while enabling employees to effortlessly leverage the Ubers they love and trust in their personal lives. I'm joined today by Justin Roehl, senior t and e manager, and Dennis Fowler, senior t and e specialist here at Uber. To get to know you both a little better, let's start with an icebreaker. Question is, what's your favorite airport restaurant? Justin, why don't you kick us off? Oh, that's a really good question. Okay. I would say you're likely to find me in an airport lounge. I'm a sucker for the free meal and free drink. But if I'm at a restaurant before a flight, I'm likely at a restaurant that would have a a salad or a sandwich offering. Awesome. Awesome. We love an overpriced airport salad. Dennis, how about you? I'm very much an eat local kind of guy. I think it's a great way to kick off or end the vacation. So, right now, I think the best I've had is at Emeril's at MSY in New Orleans. Excellent. New Orleans is such amazing food. Love that answer. Thank you both for sharing. So before we dive into today's contents, let's get through a little housekeeping. If you wanna submit any questions, just look for the q and a tab on the right side of your screen. We'll take as many questions as we can. And if we don't get to your questions by the end of the call, our team will do their best to follow-up with you and make sure we get those questions answered. If you'd like to learn more about Uber for Business, you can explore content under the docs tab. You can also click the get demo button at the top of your screen to request a demo from our Uber for Business team. We'll also follow-up with you post webinar to get that set up. And if you miss anything during the webinar, we'll be sending you a replay after we get wrapped up. So today, we'll be taking a look at the lessons your company can learn from the way Uber handles t and e for an organization of 30,000 people, including why t and e management matters and why it's important to your bigger business goals, the biggest problems companies are trying to solve through T and E, and how we tackle them at Uber and including how we use Uber for business to help. So with that in mind, let's get started. Everyone expects T and E to just work. But when it doesn't, there are pretty big impacts. There's time lost chasing down receipts and waiting for reimbursements to come through. There's money lost by paying for expenses that fall out of your normal policies, and employee satisfaction could take a hit too. Problems with t and e aren't just felt by your company. They're also felt by the traveling team as well. And the problem is that t and e can seem like it's working until it's just not. When the manual way you've been doing things breaks down, it often breaks down pretty hard. Problems can fly under the radar for months before they're even noticed. And when they do, fixing them becomes a major hassle. But there's a ton of reasons why changing the way you handle t and e can feel too hard. Justin, can you tell us about some of those challenges? Yeah. Definitely. So let's say, like, a small company, for example. You know, I think undoing mature manual processes, can be overwhelming, and can be challenged internally to say, hey. If it's not broken, why are we trying to fix it right? I think sometimes for small companies also, you know, there's question about, allocating resources or investing into systems and technology. You know, is there enough return, on that, for a small company that just can handle the process manually via sheets or whatever. Yeah. I also think, you know, if when you go down the realm of wanting to implement software, you know, who's gonna do that, who's gonna own the, the the management of the tool, the IT support after go live. So I think these are just general, challenges for a small company when we think about, you know, using systems and technology. Right? For large companies, I think oftentimes it's, you know, it's about challenging status quo. You know, so again, it's been working in the past. What do we need to change? Maybe getting, you know, stakeholders to buy in on that journey and that decision making. Sometimes it's really challenging to implement at scale. So for a lot of large companies, it's complexities of a global footprint. And then also, I think there's also, you know, prioritization, of resources. Right? So, you know, competing teams might say, hey. I wanna implement this tool where team b says I wanna implement that. And so, you know, there might be only so much, you know, monies to be had. And so a prioritization exercise can be, quite extensive when trying to make change. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. And, also, one thing we've seen across organizations of all sizes with our clients is that they're really trying to solve for the same three core problems. Dennis, could you take us through those? Sure. One of the biggest problems we've seen is, lack of visibility over your rules, your control of spend. Right? Like, how do I get accurate data? How do I get it in real time? Where is it being spent? How do I enforce my policies? How do I identify leakage or waste? And how do I make decisions about my policy? A big one another one is, how do I make my not efficient processes or manual processes more efficient? You know, the workflows from employee to manager to AP, you know, it's super tedious, error prone. It it's burdensome, really. It's it's error prone. It's it's just not efficient. And then finally, like, noncompliance, fraud risk, you've got you've got people, you know, either intentionally or not intentionally, just not going by policy. And with with not real time checks, how how do you how do you check that? The spend has already happened. It's out the gate. The horse has left the barn. Right? So you've got you've looked at spend. You've got policy violations. You even have fraud. Like, how do you control that? Mhmm. Yeah. That's very true. And now that we know that these are the core problems that we have, what are some ways that you've seen them show up? Justin, what have you and your peers told you? Yeah. I like so let's let's go with small company again. So, you know, informal T and E policies or maybe a lack of having a T and E policy, as an example. I think, small companies often have challenges of segregating duties. So it's kind of one admin wears, you know, wears many hats right at the company, and maybe don't have the necessary controls that you would prefer to have or should have. You know, I think, you know, things of it like after the fact spend monitoring and controls, takes place versus kind of beforehand, which is the the best in, best in class practice right to control upfront. You know, you may have immature audit practices. I've seen small companies don't have, you know, formality around, you know, corporate card programs and and, you know, the automation and the controls and compliance that a corporate card program can can drive. And then, like, some examples for a large company, you know, when I when I benchmark with some of my peers, you know, I hear I hear problems around complex approval chains, and, you know, not keeping things simple, can definitely, you know, lead to, like, aging, and just employee frustration from a end to end process standpoint. We see a lot of challenges around, aggregating data. So we have a lot of different tools that we may be using TD. And it's how do we consolidate them into one centralized place to get a a full picture of what's going on from a trend or a spend in that perspective. Yeah. I think, large companies are faced with, just generally large volumes of transactions, and with large volumes of transactions. You know, there's vulnerabilities around fraud or, you know, pervasive out of policy spend. You know, I think large companies are also, you know, challenged with, you know, basically aligning a process or system or tool, consistently across the globe. Right? So, again, it's, can you can you have one T and E policy? Can you have one expense tool that fits the needs of all of the various lines of businesses, entities across your global footprint? Yeah. Really helpful. And what about midsize companies? Dennis, what have you seen in your experience? Sure. So midsize companies, sometimes they're growing at a faster rate than operations can handle. You've got multiple expense tools, or sometimes the company is still operating off of spreadsheets. In my younger professional days, I was working at a magazine that you've all heard of, and they were still operating off of spreadsheets and emailing receipts. It it was unheard of. But, you know, you're also dealing with inconsistent T and E policies. Not every company is acquired with the same agreements, and that's really hard to streamline and understand and enforce because you never know who is agreeing to what. It's hard for finance too because, you know, what are you supposed to reconcile at the end of the month? Are all of your finance terms the same, and when are you reconciling? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much, guys, for walking us through how these problems look like in various sized companies. And so let's shift gears into how we've tackled a lot of these problems here at Uber as well. So let's start with the first problem, lack of visibility. Dennis, kick us off with from that. Yeah. So, you know, it's really hard to see the data in real time. Where are we spending? What are we spending and why? It's we're either not seeing it in our expense tool. We're not seeing it when the card is swiped or when a ride is taken or a meal is eaten, or, you know, it's just missing because of whatever feed integration. We're constantly looking for the data, and it's after the fact. It's hard to find those patterns. And, you know, managers are surprised when they see those budgets being exceeded, and employees don't know what's allowed. Right? Like, they're just sort of swiping the card and moving forward. They're, you know, doing their job. And it's sort of difficult for upper management to continue forward, with confidence. And it's really difficult, you know, in the end to abide by your budgets. It's hard for compliance to take charge, and and it's hard to navigate your budget for next year because, you know, you've already exceeded it. It it's sort of a guessing game. Mhmm. So what we've done, is is sort of, we've made it more visible, you know, by aggregating everything. You know, we've integrated our HRIS system. We have proactively linked, our managers into our dashboards, and, we've given them visibility. We we, have real time monitoring. We give them notifications that, hey. You you've got these trips to look at. You've got these meals to look at. For example, recently, we had a manager call out one of his employees who said, hey. You were in New York, and, it looks like you had an SUV, but you were traveling by yourself for business. That wasn't in policy. Can you tell me more? Like, why were you doing that? So that's a really good visible example that we really wouldn't have been able to see if it were you and, you know, an aggregate in our expense tool. So, being able to centralize with the Uber for Business tool was a great, way to get that visibility. Another way is usage of the tool. Right? So I'm in New York traveling in San Francisco personally. I accidentally use it in San Francisco. My manager says, hey. Says you're in San Francisco. You work out of New York. You're supposed to be in New York. What's going on? So great visibility again instead of just seeing a charge for Uber in your expense tool. Awesome. Thank you so much for explaining how we solve it here at Uber. But, of course, not every company is as large as ours. So I'm curious what these solutions would look like at companies of various sizes. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, every company is different. Right? Sometimes you have to, deal with what you've got. Reporting can be difficult. I've been doing reporting for much of my professional life. And one of the easiest things you can do is just consolidate everything together to look at trending. Use the basic dashboards. Uber for business has a really great dashboard tool. You can look at the trends and the patterns, look at who's spending and where, and that helps you flag any outliers. I always say look at the low hanging fruit. Right? For midsize companies, you can assign role based access. Let your managers do what they're supposed to do. They know where their employees are supposed to be traveling and when, so let them take a look at that. And, you know, for the larger companies, we can you can integrate with your ERPs, your expense platforms. You you can set it up by region. It'll automate alerts to your managers, get visibility at scale. It really helps to define where you need people to look and when. Thank you so much. And, yes, I agree that the role based access controls or RBAC, as they call it, has definitely made a difference with our clients, the ones that are administering these kinds of programs. Now that said, getting your team on board, with how improving your t how your t and e works is even more of a process. So, Justin, can you talk us a little bit through why doing things manually can be such a problem? Yeah. So manual is, is, intensive to the employees, is in in the form of time, and also to the admins. Right? So, manual really keeps employees and admins away from their core, goals and and responsibilities. Right? So, you know, what manual looks like in the t d world is, you know, manual reconciliations, maybe auditing expense reports at a transactional level. It could rep could represent employees manually keying in, information for their expense entry or filling out an Excel sheet. Could be, you know, managers spending valuable time reviewing line by line in an expense report. Right? So, you know, and, you know, what it looks like to the rest of the company is is it it it turns out to be in a situation where employees start to dread traveling. Right? They're like, oh, I gotta take another business trip. I means I gotta do another expense report, you know, waste a lot of time. How am I gonna get to what I need to do? How am I gonna reach my goals by the end of the year? Right? And yeah. Yeah. Also, you know, to kinda elaborate a little bit more on just the end impact of this is employee experience, suffers. So nobody likes to waste time on administrative task. You know, I think, sometimes with manual keyed and entries, you can get inaccuracies with data, and sometimes that can be challenged. It's just overall hard to scale a program when you're when you're running operations and delivering a user experience that's very manual. Mhmm. Yeah. And certainly, making an experience less manual is a great goal. But how will we put that to practice here at you Uber for Vista Uber? Yeah. So, like, you know, here at Uber, we really focus on, trying to reduce as much touch on an expense and even can we fully automate an expense. Right? So I'll give you, like, one example. You know, we we are using a centralized u four b account where essentially by doing so, we've taken all of the Uber transactions out of our expense platform. So employees just simply book their Uber ride on the centralized Uber for Business account, and we have fully automated the expense, portion of that responsibility for the employee. You know, we're always looking to automate data as well. So we certainly have found way creative ways to, you know, integrate our Uber for business data into our data aggregator tools to help drive some of our processes, to help drive compliance, to give visibility on overall spend within the t and e program. And then, also, you know, we're hyper focused in, in in just, like, the end to end workflows of a of an expense life cycle. Right? So, what we've been able to do with our Uber Uber for business account is streamline the manager approval. Right? And simply just give them a snapshot of their employees' activity, at the end of the month versus asking them to reviews, you know, transaction by transaction, expense report by expense report. So it's a great way to save time also for your managers. Right? Right. And I can certainly say as a business traveler that the automated streamlining with receipts automatically flowing into our expense system has definitely made a meaningful difference. I know those automated approvals from my manager have made a lot of difference for them too. But, yes, how do you solve it when it comes to a variety of organizations? Yeah. Definitely. So again, I'll I'll double click on the the centralizing for being concept. Again, by doing this, you can reduce employee expenses at a transactional level. Essentially, you could pay for a thousand rides with a single swipe of a credit card and then, you know, be able to perform that accounting on the back end to make sure you allocate the cost to, you know, the various accounting strings and p and l's that it needs to go to. You know, I also always recommend, you know, just standardizing your T and E policy in general. So, you know, we have a very complex global footprint, and it's super important to us to kinda maintain a single global T and E policy. And we also always try to maintain just global processes as much as possible. This will really help you to scale with the company, and reduce kind of, you know, the the the time and effort that you gotta put behind operations of t and e. Yeah. And then yeah. Anything you can do to, you know, automate, automate, your coding, or employee profile through your HRIS integrations, you know, we always encourage that as well, as a best practice versus, you know, manually creating profiles or manually adding accounting string information into expenses or u for b transactions. So, yeah, those are some of some of the things that I would suggest to my peers. Awesome. Thank you. And I think we could all agree that, like you said, the data entry piece of onboarding and offboarding employees as they join and leave the company is something we'd all want to no longer have to deal with ourselves. So now that we've set up these plans and policies and maybe everyone seems on board in the beginning, it's easy to slip back into previous habits, especially for companies that have been there for multiple years. So, Dennis, what are some ways that you can help employees stick to the policies that you and the team have set up? Sure. So a lot of our employees aren't familiar with the T and E policy. Right? Maybe they read it when they onboarded six years ago. But their role as an engineer, their role is, you know, community operations. It's not to memorize the T and E policy. Their role is not to know what class of Uber service they're allowed to take. They either forgot or they ignored it or they don't know, and we don't know until after they've taken the ride. We only know after the fact during an audit or, you know, during, them filing an expense in our expense tool. They filed a ride twice because they forgot they've already filed it. We don't know that until after the fact. Now we do have measures in place to capture that, but isn't it better to just nip that in the bud and capture it in the in the first place? Because that's frustrating the managers. They've already approved something twice. Employees then have to repay the company because they've then reimbursed for something they shouldn't have been reimbursed for. It it it's financial leakage. Right? It's frustrating to the company. It's frustrating to us. It's frustrating to everyone. So why not just centralize it and make the system work for everyone? It's it's it's easier to use the system to lock down multiple things. Right? You're preventing duplicate rides by locking the system down. You're preventing level restrictions by locking down classes of service. For for example, we allow certain classes of service based on employee. If you're an executive, you're allowed certain ride rides. If you're not, you're allowed other certain certain classes of service. We have all of that behind the scenes within the Uber, system, And employees don't even need to think about it. All they have to do is click, yes. This is a business ride, and boom. It's done. It's it's easy. It's fast, and all their manager has to do is review that on the back end. We reconcile it, and nobody has to think anything else. I love the point you made about, you know, the traveling employee doesn't have to think about it. Because you're right. My goal is to get to that conference, to get to that meeting, to get to that early office call, for example. And the last thing I need to be doing is remembering what the T and E policy said off the top of my head when I'm busy prepping for why I'm traveling for business in the first place. And as you mentioned, you know, Uber is a big company, so having these kind of policies is pretty critical when you're dealing with such a large scale of employees traveling monthly and on a global scale. But so speaking of that, how have we tackled navigating the 30,000 employees that you guys oversee with our policies? Yeah. So we've got everything tied to the employee role. Right? Locations, time of day, where does an employee work. We use analytics to looking at our policy enforcements. Half the time, they don't even know we're doing it. It's it's wonderful. We've got integration set up between multiple systems that we use, and we're able to look all all of it. And we do pre, at, and post audits all within the systems. That is a wonderful thing. It's something that I'm really passionate about, if you couldn't tell. And I I think it works for the company, and it just makes everyone's lives easier. If you're a small company, start by setting up little guardrails. Right? Just, you know, ride types. If you don't want your employees taking a certain type of ride, block it. If you don't want them spending more than a certain dollar threshold, block it. Is that going to create a headache? Possibly. But then you'll know that, you know, that's the headache that's created. And just be sure to reinforce it. Stay consistent. That's the big thing. Always stay consistent. A policy is a policy. A policy is not an exception. If the policy is the exception, it's not really a policy, is it? You know, if you're a middle company, start building those layers in there, your categories, your geography. Something that we were able to do is build in some geo, locators so employees are not able to get late night meals outside of two blocks of the office, which is super neat because we found people were picking up meals at home, basically. And that's really not working late in the office, is it? So, that's a pretty neat, concept that we were able to discover. And then look at the workflows, look at the trends. And, again, like I said earlier, my favorite thing is grabbing that low hanging fruit and figuring out where outliers are. Awesome. Thank you so much, Naz. What a wonderful way to explain it. And one thing I love that you said was, if there's too many exceptions to a policy, then it's not really a policy. So I think that's really helpful for folks to know. And so what I've taken away from this really helpful and informative session is there's no perfect implementation of t and e management. It's an ongoing process, and it's something that we need to keep tweaking and changing as your company situation evolves. Having the right fundamentals in place can make those tweaks largely a matter of just adapting to scale, and having the right solutions in place can make scaling easier. So thank you both so much for giving us a look at how we handle t and e here at Uber and how these practices can be put out to work for companies of any size. Before we wrap up today, we did get some questions that we would like to tackle. So the first question we have is from Sheree. How do we set up a Concur integration? Are there any best practices to keep in mind? Justin, would you mind taking this one? Yeah. Sure. So for integrations, you know, typically, you're gonna go with API or an SFTP, integration from your HRIS. So, you know, that's, that's typically the the two pass you do. And the advantages of setting up an integration with your HRIS would be to automate the employee profile creation. You know, it'll help, you know, activate, terminate, profiles upon, onboarding and departure from the company. So, it really helps to eliminate that manual step from an administrative perspective. Yeah. And then, like, you know, things that we're typically bringing into our, you know, VR integration file would be, general, user profile information, name, email address, you know, default manager, manager hierarchy, accounting string information. You know, often you can use custom fields to, have your, HRS populate the accounting string for a trend you know, for an employee, which then stamps that transaction, that ride or that expense, with the proper accounting string information. So that way you know who to charge for that transaction. So, yeah, those are, maybe some some helpful tips, as it relates to integrations with systems. Awesome. Thank you so much for walking us through that, Justin. Next question we have is from Ernest, and I'm sure it's a question a lot of you are thinking about. How do we decrease the amount spent on TDD? Dennis, what do you think? Absolutely. That's a great question. So first of all, look at your spend data. Take a look at trends, monitor the usage, and then start to take a look at your limits and start to set thresholds. And especially as it relates to Uber for business, start putting those, limits onto your dashboard. And, you know, maybe at a certain time of day, your employees can only spend x amount of dollars because that's how much a Uber costs. And that's how you can control your spend on a more proactive level. It it it's not that it's just this is what it costs. It's more a, I can manage my costs because I know their new version only cost x amount of dollars at this time of day. Yep. Yep. And definitely having those controls set up helps make it set it and forget it. And like you said, it helps someone like me who's ordering a business right, you know, know what what's within policy. So thank you so much for that answer. The next question we have is from Werner. How do you keep track of what expense category a specific trip should be allocated for? Justin, how how do you think about this? Yeah. Great question. So, with you for b, you can actually, deploy, codes, for your for your rider. So essentially, one employee goes to book their ride, a code, you can have you can actually have them select the code, and that can be linked to your expense type. So I, it could be like employee morale or meals or a ground transportation. So, if you wanna capture what the expense type or expense category is upfront at the time of booking, you certainly can do that. And then that information is available in the in the reporting. And then also the note, you know, admins could always, after the fact, adjust coding via the e four b dashboard as well. So, but, yeah, that's, hopefully, a helpful 10 tip for how to, you know, capture the expense code or expense type for u for b transactions. Love that. I do think it's really helpful. And, also, the expense codes, like you said, that feature we have on Uber for business is really helpful to me as well because sometimes I'll be ordering a business meal, but then I need to switch it to a personal meal. And then having that expense code screen come up, so I'm realizing I'm on my business profile versus my personal profile helps remind me I actually do need to switch back to the personal profile. So thank you so much. Okay. And then last question that we have time for today is a question from Regina. How do I get in contact with customer support? Dennis, how do you do it? So there are a lot of options. It depends on what your question is. There's the knowledge center, which is great for knowledge sharing. There's email, phone, or chat. Perfect. Easy peasy. And those are the various options that we have for you to get in touch with us. Okay. So thank you so much, and we're going to wrap up today's session on that note. Thank you again for answering all of these questions, Justin and Dennis, and for sharing your valuable knowledge with us. And thank you to everyone who took their time to join us. Following today's event, you you'll receive a link to the recording to revisit any of this great content at a later date. And, again, if you'd like to learn more about any of today's material, please visit our website or contact one of our team members to request a custom demo. Thank you everyone for joining us today, and we hope to see you again very soon.