Ola Corporate Blog

Every Employees’ Need – Ola Corporate

With travel being an important part of our work, organizations have taken various measures to make travel to work for their employees easy and trouble free. Public transport becomes a hassle especially when one needs to reach meetings and close deals on time. Thus almost all organizations have made cabs available through various cab vendors in a bid to make sure that their employees do not miss important meetings, deal closures and reach work on time. Corporate cab services also help employees a great deal especially when they need to travel long distances for work.

Employee Expectation:

Employees have a set of expectations of their own as far as corporate travel is concerned. These include:

Timely cabs especially for those working in shifts.
The power to book their own cabs thus allowing lot of flexibility.
Employees would also like to choose their ride types, as well as the cab timings.
A hassle free expense management process.
Easy reimbursements and quick access to invoices.

However, unfortunately these needs of the employees are not met many a time and employees struggle to get timely cabs. Also, there are flexibility issues and employees need to struggle with multiple permissions and rigid timelines to confirm bookings. Then there are efficiency issues from the part of the travel desk managers and employees are thus stuck multiple times with no cab bookings. It’s here, that to address these issues, a need for a one-stop-solution for travel management becomes of utmost importance.

Why Ola Corporate?

Keeping in mind all of the above mentioned employee needs and expectation Ola Corporate was brought into being. You have known Ola as the company that redefined personal mobility for urban India, and now, with Ola Corporate, we bring the same ease, efficiency and affordability to corporate travel and providing cabs exclusively for business drops and pickups. We aim at enriching employee travel experiences while saving their energies for other productive work.

What we Offer

Superior Ride Experience: Get top-rated drivers, zero cancellation charges, real-time ride tracking facility and 24*7 dedicated support.

Effortless Booking: Enjoy the freedom to book the cab of your choice, at the time and place of your convenience, at the tap of a button.

Hassle-Free Reimbursements: Smoothen your reimbursements through Ola Corporate’s digitized cab approvals, e-invoices and paper-less expense management.

Corporate Advantage: Delight yourself with our partner offers and discounts exclusive for Ola Corporate users.

Safety: Ola Corporate offers real time tracking of rides and we also provide an emergency alert button right on the Ola app.

So get onto Ola Corporate today and start taking your corporate rides right from your Ola app. Click here to know how.

Ola Corporate’s Fabulous 5+2 Offer

Opting for corporate rides would now get you rewarded. All you need to do is, take 5 Corporate rides in a calendar month and get Rs 100/- off on any two of your Ola rides – personal or corporate.

So go ahead and book yourself a corporate ride right away!

Here’s how you can do it in 3 easy steps:

Login to your Ola app and select the ride of your choice.
Click on the ‘Ride Now’ option and enter your pickup and drop locations.
Now switch to your corporate profile before hitting “Confirm Booking”.

So don’t wait any longer, opt for your corporate rides today and make the most of this offer.

Term & Conditions:

Users who take at least 5 Ola Corporate rides in a calendar month will become eligible for this offer.
The offer is valid till 30th June 2017.
Eligible users will receive the discount coupon codes by 8th of the the next calendar month. The discounts codes will be visible in the “Offers & Free Rides” section on the Ola App.
The offer is valid only to those who receive this communication from Ola.
Ola reserves the right to unilaterally modify / terminate these offers.

ONE Traveldesk – Now Allowing Cab Bookings for Your Guests

Not too long ago we at Ola Corporate had launched ONE Traveldesk, a feature which allowed admins of all organizations who are onboard Ola Corporate the ability to book corporate rides for their employees right from their desktops. Admins can thus move away from unreliable manual transport management systems to a more robust and digitized platform to fulfil corporate travel needs.

But employee travel needs was not the only need that needed to be addressed. Admins of various organizations also had a need to provide cabs for various purposes for their various guests. These included:

Airport pick up-drops for important clients and for senior level executives.
Ground travel needs for interview candidates especially for those coming from other cities.
Hotels needed to provide timely cabs for their guests either for sightseeing or for airport travel.

Why the enhanced ONE Traveldesk feature:

With the newest ‘Guest Booking’ option would now come handy for admins of all organizations across industries. Through guest booking admins can now do away with the cumbersome paper based manual travel desk management, along with the need for coordination with multiple vendors. Also there would no longer be inefficient tracking and auditing processes.

To book a ride for their guests traveldesk admins would need to login to their Ola Corporate account and click on ‘Book a Ride’ through the ONE Traveldesk and select ‘Guest Booking’. Once the cab is booked, the guest as well as the travel desk manager would both receive the cab and driver details in the form of an SMS and an email respectively. Admins can also configure a separate allowance for the purpose of guest booking through the ‘Account Information’ section, helping Traveldesk admins in easy expense management.

Well, if you are an admin or a travel desk manager of your company then it’s time you try out our brand new feature and remove the need for managing your own fleet of cabs or a dedicated cab vendor; enjoy digitised booking and billing and have a simplified auditing system in place with consolidated ride tracking and invoicing.

Booking cabs for your guests would now be easier than ever with the current addition to our ‘ONE Traveldesk’. However, it’s a premium feature and if you wish to use the same then do reach out to our sales personnel at corporatesale@olacabs.com.

Refer and Get Rewarded

Ola Rentals have made corporate life much easier, with employees being able to travel at multiple locations with a cab at their disposal. One no longer needs to worry about a meeting being stretched than the stipulated time or setting up multiple client meetings on the same day as one can book chauffeur driven AC cabs on hourly packages. The best part, rental bookings can even be extended if needed.

Ola Corporate is now going a step ahead and making Ola Rentals all the more fabulous with their newest ‘Referral Code’ offer.

How it works:

Eligible users would have received a unique referral code on their email ids.
Refer the code to your colleagues, having an active Ola Corporate account.
For each colleague opting for a rental ride (using your unique referral code) you would get Ola Money worth Rs 200.
Your colleagues would also receive a one-time Ola Money credit worth Rs. 200.
The referral code can be used by your colleague(s) only once either for a personal or a corporate rental ride.

So hurry, refer and get rewarded. Offer valid till April 23rd ‘17, and the Ola Money transfer would happen by 30th April 2017.

Book Your Outstation Corporate Rides Today!

Are you one of those who suffer from the pains of inter-city travel for official work quite frequently? Do you hate heckling with cab drivers to stay put a little longer when there’s a sudden change in your plan? Is it really difficult to travel outside city limits as most cabbies refuse to travel such long distances? Also, do cash payments pose as a hassles sometimes, due to the unavailability of the exact change and the like?

We at Ola Corporate have thus introduced Ola Outstation for all your corporate ride needs. Employees can now book outstation rides right from their Ola cabs app and mark it as ‘Corporate’. Ola Outstation is our solution to your inter-city travel woes. You can even plan your trip way ahead by booking cabs upto 7 days in advance, and the trip date can range from 1 to 10 days. So, whether you are travelling to a different city for an important deal closure or to cities where flights are unavailable, Ola is your ride. So book an outstation today and travel comfortably in one of our cabs, be it in a Mini, a Sedan or an SUV or even a Luxury cab, Ola has you covered.

How is Outstation Valuable?

You get cabs at your disposal for your intercity travel needs.
Travel on demand by booking cabs just one hour in advance.
You even have the option to book a one way route (for select routes only).
Payments are cashless with an extremely transparent pricing system.

How to book an Outstation ride:

Open Outstation on Ola app: Access the Ola Outstation icon (scroll to right if not visible on front panel) and enter your destination city.
Select your time of travel: Choose from travelling 1 hour later or book in advance.
Choose your travel package and car category: Book “1 way trip” (available only on select routes) or “round trip” for up to 10 days. Choose between the choice of cars
Turn the corporate toggle on: This ensures your ride is tracked as a corporate ride and you get a corporate invoice too.
Board and enjoy your ride: Read through the ride details and click on ‘accept and confirm’. Your driver details will be shared 45 mins prior to pick-up time.

Our Solution to Your Multi-city Employee Travel Budget Woes

The task of an Admin is not easy. Admins can quite easily be at the receiving end of their boss’s wrath may be because he has simply been unable to roll out the required budget for a corporate ride for an employee travelling outside his/her base location. Well, what can one do when there’s a specific budget assigned by the company and as an admin one needs to stick to it. Of course they do have the option of taking special permissions for increasing the travel budget for such outstation travel needs. But, as you would agree the process of getting such sanctions passed are quite time consuming, especially in large corporates.

As the admin of your company how many times did you face hassles while booking cabs for your employees? Guess multiple number of times. The inconvenience can range from the trouble of booking cabs for a large number of employee at one go and even issues with reimbursements as many a time employees are unable to provide proper corporate ride receipts. To add to these, would be the hassle of managing the corporate travel budget especially for outstation travels, as mentioned earlier. It’s here that admins would need a less rigid budget policy to provide a seamless travel experience for the employee.

Of course it can be argued that the employee must be prompted to pay initially and manage the receipts while travelling outstation and the company would reimburse. But how many times does it work out well both for the employee or the travel desk? Most of the time the paper receipts are misplaced, or employees are able to find out ways to submit fraudulent travel bills.. It is here that Ola Corporate’s budget policy for outstation corporate travel comes handy for both admins and companies. This policy allows employees to travel without having to worry about the payment or the budget as it is deducted from the company’s global budget. It not only solves the continuous budget issues that companies face while their employees travel outstation, but also solves the issue of employees over charging the company through fraudulent bills. Also, employees can add ride reasons before or during the ride and it automatically gets lodged in the company’s employee travel details, hence maintaining cumbersome paper invoices is no longer required.

This multi city travel solution from Ola for corporate not only saves employees from the fear of running out of their travel budget while they are already traveling, but also helps companies maintain the employee travel budget easily. Since these amounts are directly deducted from the company’s global budget keeping a tab on these large travel transactions gets easier and if needed intracity travel costs can be cut down to some extent to maintain the travel budget of the company.

Simplify Your Expense Management by Linking Ola Corporate with Happay

Business expense management is a pain for all big and small organizations. With large number of employees and their expenses to be handled companies almost always face issues. Keeping a tab of all the paper invoices, entering the data and finally reconciling them is a major issue. Employees face a major hassle while having to keep a tab on all the paper invoices. Also it gets tough when they have to go through the tedious back and forth processes in case of errors in expense reporting.

To tackle these issues you can resort to various expense management tools. One such is Happay- a business expense management solution that streamlines everything expense related end to end. Happay provides real time visibility and control over the expenses made. We provide Ola Corporate users the option to integrate their Ola account with their Happay account, in order to make their expense management easy and stress free. Employees need to link their Ola and Happay accounts, after which all invoices of corporate ride taken on Ola will be automatically pushed into Happay for further processing. One can now forget the hassles of dealing with multiple paper invoices and scanning them for expense reporting on Happay.

How it works:

Users will get an email with an unique link, clicking on which they would be prompted to enter their Happay account credentials after which their Ola Corporate account would be integrated with Happay. Just in case you haven’t received an email contact your company’s admin for the same.

Integrating your Ola account with Happay:

Click on the unique Account Integration link sent to you on your official email Id
This would take you to the Happay login page
Login with your Happay credentials and once that done your Ola account will be automatically integrated with Happay.

After the integration employees can view all Ola Corporate invoices in their Happay account and take the necessary actions in Happay.

So what are you waiting for? Get moving, get using Happay today!

Simplify Your Expense Management by Linking Ola Corporate with Concur

Ola Corporate helps companies provide their employees with regular, uninterrupted and timely corporate travel along with hassle free pickup and drops, various cab options and affordable rates. Ola helps Companies and employees alike. On the one hand corporates are able to manage the budget of their employees’ travel expenses through our robust digitised system and on the other, employees can book cabs for corporate travel from their Ola app helping them lower the dependency on travel desk managers.

Ola also helps in managing the corporate travel expenses of its users and thus Ola has integrated with Concur.

How Concur Would help Ola Corporate Users:

Concur is used as a central expense management mode and users use it seamlessly to request for reimbursement from their companies for their Ola Corporate rides, once users link their Ola accounts to their Concur accounts.

Setting up Concur accounts are easy. Once attached to the Ola Corporate account all ride invoices will be pushed to concur. Employees can view these detailed helping in effortless reporting and expensing.

Attaching Concur with Ola

Here’s How:

Login to your Concur account.
Then select Ola app from the ‘Apps for Me’ section.
In the Ola App details page click on ‘Connect’ to link your Ola Corporate account with Concur account
On hitting ‘Connect’ you will be taken to a page where you need to provide your Ola account credentials. You can login here with either your registered email address or mobile number.
That’s It! Your Ola Corporate and Concur accounts are linked. Take a corporate ride with Ola and your invoices are saved in your Concur account.

However, just in case at any point of time you wish to unlink your corporate account from your concur account log in to your Concur account and remove the Ola app from there.

Admins Take Note- The Analytics Dashboard is Here

Ola Corporate is here to make the lives of all the admins and travel desk managers all the more hassle free. Well, we at Ola Corporate have come up with another brand new feature yet again – The Analytics Dashboard. So the moment you log into your Ola Corporate admin account you would automatically be taken into the analytics dashboard.

Wondering what it does? Well, here it is:

Through the analytics dashboard you can keep a tab on a host of corporate travel activities of your employees. This would include information on the number of employees activating their Ola corporate account, or the how many have taken or not taken rides. You can also keep a tab on your employee travel expenses and budget the same accordingly. We also provide graphical representation of user experience helping you to make improvisations if and when required.

Viewing the Analytics Dashboard:

Activation Analytics: This section would help companies understand the various stages of product adoption by the employees. You can view the invites sent, the invites accepted, first ride and Active users or users who have been actively taking corporate rides over a week. This would help companies understand employee product adoption and whether rides are taken or not. Armed with these details admins can easily find out ways of making employees aware of the benefits of Ola Corporate along with the travel benefits.

Budget Analytics: Budgeting is one of the most important factors for a company to thrive better and this also comes to play while budgeting for employee travels. Through Ola Corporate’s analytics dashboard admins and travel desk managers can get a detailed insight on the same all in one place. This section shows the budget utilization for employees in a group. Budget usage can be calculated along with details of whether employees are exhausting their travel budget early in the month. In such instances admins can either increase the budget or take necessary steps to keep the budget within limits.

Spend Analytics: This section allows admins to view the expenses on employee travel. However this section would also show the ride count helping admins calculate the total expenditure on a per ride basis. The overall spend of the corporate account would be shown in a bar chart across the following segments- city, group, category and ride reason. As per the change in the selection, spend could be shown accordingly.

Experience Analytics: It’s here that customer/employee experience is captured. The admin can look into the quality of drivers or the cabs he/she has been provided for his bookings. Overall this would act as a transparent method for the admins in terms of getting an insight into user experience and making changes if required.

Ola Corporate Easing Your Business Travels

Corporate travel is of utmost need in today’s world. Each one of us travel everyday not only to our respective offices but also for client meets, site visits and so on. Thus, incurring high work travel related expenses is quite common. Not only this, getting cabs during peak hours, or renting out cabs for day long requirements is many a time difficult due to availability issues and also due to high monetary demands by the drivers.

This is where we at Ola Corporate come in. Ola Corporate aims at making corporate travel a breeze for working professionals. The best part, you can book cabs for corporate purposes right from your Ola app. Once your company is onboard Ola Corporate you would receive an email in your official id for verification. Verify your official email id and login to your Ola account and select the ride category of your choice. Then choose the corporate profile from the profile option and hit confirm. Your ride will be marked as ‘Corporate’. Once the ride is complete you would receive invoices marked as corporate into your official email id. Not only this, you can even add ‘Ride Reason’ before or after the ride helping you to provide detailed information about your business related travels to your admins and travel desk managers.

This would help you to keep a record of your corporate travel expenses all in one place. You can even choose to receive your corporate ride invoices on a monthly or weekly basis helping you get consolidated reports of all rides taken. This in turn help would help you provide invoices easily to your travel desk managers for reimbursements and would allow you to forget the hassle of managing a whole lot of paper invoices.

You can even view other profile details once you view your corporate profile. This includes the days and the time during which you can avail corporate rides, ride type that you can book and the payment policy. All of these would be set by your company and you can avail the corporate rides as per these policies. The payment policies would include either auto paid by company or to be reimbursed. Credit /debit card payments would not be needed at all if the payment option set by the company is ‘Auto Paid by Company. However in case it’s the ‘To be Reimbursed’ mode of payment you can add your card details and make your payment process hassle free. So while booking your ride you can simply choose the credit or debit card from which you wish the payment to be made and confirm the booking. This would allow you to make payments for your rides either instantly or later as per your convenience. Once the payment is cleared you can continue taking corporate rides.