At-Home Charging Solutions for Employees: Benefits, Challenges, and How to Tackle Reimbursements

As more businesses, organizations, and municipalities make the switch to electric vehicles (EVs), one important factor that needs to be considered is charging take-home vehicles. Offering at-home charging for fleet EVs is one component to simplify the process of transitioning from traditional fuel-burning fleets to EVs and, ultimately, boost your organization’s fleet sustainability.  

From our perspective as the premier fleet electrification analytics firm having analyzed more than 150 fleets, we’ll help weigh the options regarding whether adding at-home charging solutions should be a part of your fleet electrification journey. Read on to learn more about the specific benefits and drawbacks of at-home charging, how employers can track reimbursements, and more.

The Key Benefits of Offering At-Home Charging

At-home charging offers several benefits for both employers and employees. For employers, supporting at-home charging allows fleets to put EVs into use in high-mileage applications that can result in substantial savings.

For employees with take-home vehicles, at-home charging is far more convenient than making extra trips to public charging stations or going into the office to charge. With at-home charging solutions, employees can rest assured that they’ll have a full battery when they need it most—no more scrambling to find a charger in between meetings or site-visits.

The Challenges of Offering At-Home Charging

Take-home vehicle charging doesn't come without its challenges. For one, there aren't uniform standards for at-home charging among different electric vehicle manufacturers, which means that businesses or organizations may need to invest in several types of charging equipment to accommodate different vehicle models. Additionally, installation can be challenging. Some employees' homes may not have an outlet or wiring capable of sufficient power for EV charging, resulting in variable costs to install equipment. Moreover, employees that rent their home instead of own or live in multi-family housing may not have the ability to add a charger to their residence.

Additionally, the rate differences among utility companies means that it can be a challenge to accurately reimburse your drivers. And, of course, you want to make sure that you’re only reimbursing for charging a fleet vehicle and not accidentally reimbursing for any personal vehicle charging that may occur on the at-home charger. All of this makes it imperative that you track exactly how much charging the fleet vehicle does at the residential location. This is a considerable challenge for governments that legally cannot overcompensate employees for expenses. Thus, it’s important to collect concrete data for each individually assigned vehicle in order to accurately reimburse employees.

How Sawatch Labs Helps Streamline the Reimbursement Process

Sawatch Lab’s ionEV software allows fleet managers to easily calculate proper reimbursement charges for each take-home vehicle in their fleet by tracking vehicle charging using telematics. Not only that, but it helps you easily set your reimbursement rate, pull monthly summaries by vehicle and residential location, export monthly, quarterly, and annual reports, and more. Essentially, Sawatch’s ionEV software is a key tool to making the reimbursement process of take-home vehicle charging as easy and pain-free as possible—for both fleet managers and employers.

So, what makes our software different? Well, our vehicle telematics and analytics software look at individual vehicles in your fleet rather than average fleet data. We track and analyze each vehicle using it as the single source of truth instead of relying on averages that result in inaccurate reimbursement and costly stipends.

Single Employee Vehicle Charging Made Simple

While every fleet electrification and management plan is different, take-home vehicle charging can and should be on the discussion table if your organization’s fleet includes EVs. At Sawatch Labs, we understand that each business, organization, and municipality have unique needs when it comes to fleet management and sustainability goals. Our team makes it their business to develop data-driven solutions to make managing and electrifying fleets as efficient and cost-effective as possible.