Learn how mandatory Expense Codes and Notes can introduce more accountability and visibility into your organization’s travel program. Uploading a list of Expense Codes and/or Expense Notes gives your employees the ability to search and choose them in the Lyft rider app when they’re using a business profile.
In this article, we'll cover:
How to turn on mandatory Expense Info:
- Log in to the Lyft Business Portal (or at business.lyft.com/login)
- Navigate to ‘Business Profiles,’ then click ‘Expense Info’
- Toggle 'Require expense code' to green
- Toggle 'Require expense note' to green
Expense Codes can be required without Expense Notes and vice versa. Toggle on both, one, or neither if you don't require them to be mandatory.
This feature will require that employees enter both an Expense Code and an Expense Note (you can think of Expense Notes as a trip's purpose) before they can request a ride using their business profile. If the employee requests a personal ride but switches to their business profile during the payment process, they will still be prompted to enter their Expense Info before they can complete payment.
How to set up Expense Codes
Sample Expense Code CSV: You’ll find a sample CSV file included in the same ZIP file as these instructions under ‘Expense Info’ in Lyft Business Profiles. Feel free to modify that file as you follow along with the instructions below, or export from another system to match. You’ll find some sample rows as follows:
AEJ749, Customer Support, “”
JE2939, Marketing, “”
JIEJ908, Super Secret Department, “john@example.com,jane@example.com”
Please format your Expense Code CSV with the following details:
- Encoding: UTF-8
- Header Row: Code, Description, Emails
- Delimiter: Comma
- Columns: Code, Description (Optional), Emails (Optional)
Expense Codes are typically a short alphanumeric string such as “AEJ749” used to identify your client, team, department, or project cost center. These will be displayed to your employees when they request a ride. For the best user experience, we recommend using codes with fewer than 15 characters long.
Description (Optional): The description column is meant to help your employees search for and select the right code by providing an easy-to-understand description of the code. For example, if your code for a department is “AEJ749”, you can add “Customer Support” as its description. Your employees will be able to search for the code or description “Customer Support” when documenting their business travel in the Lyft app. If you leave this column blank, descriptions will not be visible to employees.
Emails (Optional): If you need to restrict certain codes to be available only to specific employees, you can add details to the employee emails column. For example, if you include employee emails “john@example.com,jane@example.com” in the third column next to “AEJ749, Customer Support,” then only John and Jane will see this particular code and description in the Lyft app. These restrictions are not visible to employees, they are used by Lyft’s systems to restrict access to particular codes. If you leave this column blank, all employees will be able to see the expense code.
How to set up Expense Notes
Sample Expense Note CSV: You’ll also find a sample expense note CSV file included in the same .zip as this instruction file. Feel free to modify that file or export from another system to match. You’ll find some sample rows as follows:
Client Meeting, “”
Trip to Airport, “”
Secret Lyft Privileges, “travel-manager@example.com”
Please format your expense note CSV with the following details:
- Encoding: UTF-8
- Header Row: Note, Emails
- Delimiter: Comma
- Columns: Note, Emails (Optional)
Expense Notes are commonly used to track business travel reasons such as “Client Meeting” or “Trip to Airport.” If you upload a CSV file for expense notes, your employees will be able to search for and select from the options in the Lyft app. You can choose to upload either or both expense codes and notes files. While expense codes support having three separate columns (Code, Description, Emails), expense notes support only two columns (Note, Emails).