Lyft’s New Service Makes Deductions Easier

Receipts are a welcome help for businesses of all sizes, perhaps small businesses most of all, as these represent a way to protect earnings against over eager, grasping taxes. Now, getting a receipt for that Lyft ride is that much easier thanks to a new service the company offers: automatic ride receipt forwarding.

For those who take rides under a Business Profile in the Lyft app, the new tool will kick in automatically once it’s properly set up. First, there has to be a Business Profile to begin with, and then from there, it’s as simple as selecting the expense management tool of choice-it sends receipts to any of several different expense management tools from Abacus to Zoho—and then as long as your business profile email matches the email used for expense tracking, it’s all ready. There’s one exception in Concur; that requires users to login using those credentials.

Granted, the new feature isn’t really that much different from current operations—it just removes one step from the overall process—but it’s a step that makes things that much simpler to work with. It also helps ensure the receipts get to where they need to go, which is the only way receipts can really be useful.

There’s real value in such a process; speaking here as a small businessman myself, I know it’s tough to keep all those receipts handy and itemized, and converting these into a usable format for later compiling into a document to show just how much you spent on your own business operations is a practice that takes a couple hours. Anything that can be done to reduce the time on that is thus welcome—it recovers unpaid time spent doing amateur accounting for the government—and should be used widely.

Granted, not every company has a lot of people using Lyft, but for those whose workers spend a lot of time shuttled back and forth by these cars, Lyft’s new receipt forwarding system could be a very useful addition. It likely won’t be long before Uber puts something similar in place, lest it risk losing market share.