Lyft Business Enhances Expense Management Support

Ride-hailing app Lyft is continuing to target its business travel users through enhancements of expense management support.

The company announced on its blog this week that its B2B service, Lyft Business, will be upgraded with more efficient documentation of employee rides using the app. The platform will display several expense codes from within the Lyft platform that riders can choose from to categorize their expenses for easier filing, the company noted.

Lyft is also adding greater controls for managers, enabling them to require that employees choose such expense codes or add notes as part of a ride request so they can have additional information and data with employee trips.

Businesses can upload their own expense codes and note requirements into Lyft, choose the requirement that riders enter their expense information and receive monthly reports on employee rides that include cost, route and other data.

The upgrades are first available for the Lyft app on iOS devices, and support for Android devices will follow.

Earlier enhancements to Lyft Business include the addition of receipt forwarding, a feature launched last year that automates the transmission of ride data to fleet managers for easier reconciliation. The company also integrated with corporate travel and expense management platforms, including Expensify, Chrome River and Concur.

Last month, new data from T&E platform Certify revealed that Lyft took 9 percentage points of the corporate ride-hailing market away from industry leader Uber in the first quarter of the year. That’s a 10 percent increase in market share for Lyft compared to the same period a year ago.

Uber continues to dominate, however, with 81 percent of the market, according to an analysis of expenses filed through the Certify platform.

“We will carry this momentum into the rest of 2018 and remain focused on making business travel easy, accessible and affordable,” said Lyft Chief Business Officer David Baga in a statement emailed to Bloomberg at the time.