Lyft Accelerates its Reconciliation Process with Navan Expense
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 Navan was the perfect end-to-end solution for this.
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.”
Challenges
- •Maintaining compliance while promoting efficiency
- •Processes and tools required heavy manual intervention
- •Employee pain around expense reports
Results with Navan
- •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
Prior to launching Navan Expense, Lyft employees would spend hours digging through faded and crumpled receipts, making up for several hours preparing an expense report after returning from a trip. From an employee satisfaction perspective, it was clear the team was on the right track by giving employees time back to focus on the strategic priorities of their jobs and not tactical concerns of submitting expense receipts.
Lyft’s emphasis on user engagement and experience made employees happy, but with Navan Expense the company is also able to maintain the internal controls they need. "The cards help with compliance and auditing because they filter transactions through the T&E policy expectations of our company at every level, including per diems. We’ve never had that level of automation before," she explained.
Accelerating Expense Reconciliation
With expense management systems, reconciliation requires a lot of manual work, especially for expense reports. With Navan Expense, reconciliation is simple and instantaneous. “Because Navan Expense 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 Navan Expense. 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. Navan Expense 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 Navan do the work, knowing the cards are integrated with technology we trust.
Jasmine Pope
Procurement Travel & Expense Analyst