At Accelerate this year, four longtime customers sat down for a panel on how their employee driving programs evolved — a food distributor managing $25 million in annual reimbursements, a beverage distributor that grew from 22 million to 50 million cases a year through acquisition, a $20 billion medical device company, and a packaging company whose program predates most of the people managing it today. Different industries, different fleet sizes, different reasons for getting involved. But the same handful of realizations kept surfacing — the kind that, in hindsight, none of them wish they’d waited on.
The visibility gap in employee driving nobody notices until it’s expensive
One panelist described the moment her organization realized how much it didn’t know. While building the case for adding MVR and insurance monitoring, she asked her accounting team for a report on mileage reimbursements — without specifying “just the people on our reimbursement platform.” That was the gap. The report revealed hundreds of employees using personal vehicles for work outside the formal employee driving program. They weren’t unknown employees—they were simply outside the organization’s established visibility into business driving.
It’s a specific kind of blind spot: not ignorance that people are driving for work, but no visibility into the scale of it. The fix itself was straightforward — move eligible drivers onto the reimbursement program, add safety training and monitoring for the rest. The hard part was that no single system had been built to do this before the business scaled, so getting an accurate count meant pulling data across accounting, HR, and the reimbursement platform and reconciling it by hand, one report at a time.
Reimbursement and compensation get blurred, especially through M&A
The beverage distributor’s program grew almost entirely through acquisition, and every acquired company brought its own version of a driving program with it. Some of those programs had folded additional payments into reimbursement that were functioning more like compensation—for example, a flat monthly add-on layered on top of the standard reimbursement and treated as a single line item.
Untangling that took real effort: a clear definition of what counted as reimbursement, what counted as compensation, and a firm rule about keeping the two apart going forward. The panelist’s advice was direct — leave the reimbursement program simple and easy to understand, and put compensation where it belongs, in compensation.
The pattern shows up any time programs get inherited rather than built — acquisitions, leadership changes, or a program that’s simply aged past the people who designed it. Nobody sets out to blur the two. It happens by accretion.
One function should have responsibility for a complete view of the employee driving program
More than one panelist described a program that had been split across departments: the vehicle team here, expense management there, safety and compliance somewhere else — each with just a partial view and no shared one. As one panelist put it: the teams had become siloed, all running in parallel, with no visibility into where they overlapped or where they didn’t. Bringing vehicle, expense, and employee driving data under a single function didn’t just simplify reporting. It surfaced people who were driving for work but routing their reimbursements through a general expense system instead of the dedicated program built to manage that risk.
The common thread: The data existed. It just lived in different systems owned by different teams. It was an org chart problem that created a data problem. Both panelists trace the fix back to the same move: putting vehicle, expense, and compliance data in front of one team instead of three. Not because any single department was doing its job poorly — accounting was doing accounting, the vehicle team was doing vehicle management — but because nobody was positioned to see all three at once.
Waiting to update the employee driving program costs more than updating it
One panelist offered a comparison that landed with the room: no company would tell its travel team to keep booking flights at 2020 prices. But plenty of companies are still running vehicle reimbursement programs built around vehicle costs, base years, or mileage assumptions from years earlier, because updating the program feels like a bigger lift than leaving it alone. The gap between what a program pays and what driving actually costs doesn’t stay the same size. It compounds every year it’s left unexamined, until fixing it means a much bigger adjustment than reviewing it annually ever would have.
The theme underneath all of it
One panelist summed up the throughline better than any individual anecdote could: don’t wait until complexity forces your hand. Constantly reviewing and refining a program, instead of treating it as something to configure once and revisit only when a problem shows up, was the pattern behind almost every story shared on that stage.
Despite representing different industries and different program sizes, every panelist described the same pattern: their biggest problems weren’t created overnight. They accumulated quietly as the business grew, changed, and became more complex. The organizations that stayed ahead treated employee driving as something to evaluate continuously—not something to configure once and forget. By the time those gaps became visible, they were also more expensive to fix.
If any of these gaps sound familiar, talk to a Motus expert about where to look first.
