Lyft Business Steps Up Expense Management
Keeping track of expenses is one of business’ most surprisingly vital functions. Sure, it’s not quite as big as managing cash flow, but managing expenses helps keep a track on profitability and helps out big at tax time. To that end, Lyft—likely looking to pull users from the Uber market wherever possible—has stepped up its support of business users by augmenting its expense management functions.
The new change, coming to Lyft Business, will offer improvements to documentation connected to the rides taken. Lyft riders can choose from several expense codes, which in turn should make it easier for the accounting back at the parent company to categorize the expenses accordingly.
A separate feature allows users to add notes, or requires users to choose specific expense codes by their managers in a bid to provide extra data for operations down the line. These new features join several other recent advances for Lyft Business, including receipt forwarding and an integration with several expense management operations including Chrome River and Expensify.
Such additions are proving useful, as Lyft actually managed to take nine percent of the corporate ride-hailing market from Uber just in the first quarter of 2018. That in turn represented at 10 percent increase in total market share from the same time in 2017 for Lyft.
David Baga, Lyft’s chief business officer, offered a defiant statement, saying “We will carry this momentum into the rest of 2018 and remain focused on making business travel easy, accessible and affordable.”
Rather, Baga hopes Lyft will carry that momentum into the rest of 2018; to simply expect to would be to deny the power of its larger competitor and the array of substitute goods (or rather, services) contained in the market. It’s certainly got momentum to start with, and its ongoing innovation likely has something to do with that. That and the recent run of terrible events that have hit Uber like the loss of London, and the various other legal challenges incoming.
Certainly, Lyft is making hay while the sun shines, but it’s also preparing for a future where Uber is back in action and out of its current woods. Only time will tell just how well this works out, but Lyft is building itself an excellent position in the meantime.