Original text here from Patrice Bernard (LinkedIn)
Since its inception, Uber has built its success on user experience transparency, especially through its seamless integration of payment processing. This focus also drives its enterprise division to offer businesses direct connections to major platforms for managing professional expenses.
This approach becomes even more meaningful when an independent American study reveals that ground travel and meals are among the most frequently reimbursed employee expenses, with Uber leading as one of the most popular vendors. Over 200,000 companies of various sizes use its dedicated services for transporting and feeding their staff, particularly during business trips, as well as for their clients and guests.
Whether it's to save a bit of time and energy in small organizations or to streamline processes in large corporations, Uber’s solution hinges on automatic information exchange with most expense management tools used by financial departments. The list now includes about a dozen software programs, recently joined by two leading players, Brex and Ramp.
The most visible benefit of such a combination, which is extremely easy to implement (in just a few clicks), is the simplification of administrative processes. For employees, this means no longer having to keep receipts and track reimbursement requests. For accounting managers, necessary data are immediately available, assigned, and reconciled without their intervention and error-free.
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But that's not all! The integration works both ways and allows for the implementation of customized restrictions on usage, be it the type of expense or the amount spent, possibly subject to a predefined allocation code (for example, for distribution over the budget of a particular project or a client account), with upfront blocking at the time of ordering. The result is better compliance with existing policies, without additional effort.
In this initiative, as in its overall strategy, Uber exemplifies financial management in the digital era. Traditionally seen as a peripheral activity or a necessary but intrinsically valueless accessory, financial management should, as much as possible (and modern technologies make this feasible in countless situations), be embedded deep within customer journeys, ultimately becoming invisible. Evidently, if traditional institutions don't embrace this trend, others are ready to seize these opportunities.
