Freight Invoicing Software: Reconcile Billing Discrepancies With Ease

Managing logistics and supply chain expenses is like walking a tightrope. No matter how carefully you budget, those seemingly insignificant expenses have a way of adding up. Take freight invoicing and billing, for example. Seemingly minuscule invoicing errors—like slightly incorrect truckloads or timesheet discrepancies—can quietly chip away at your budget.

Carrier charges are a big part of logistics and freight costs, regardless of how frequently you ship. Examining your carrier invoices is critical, as you might be overpaying for logistics and shipping services if you aren’t monitoring the billing statements. 

That's where freight invoicing and reconciliation come in. It is a financial management process that ensures your records match the invoices raised by your transporters and helps you reconcile with respective parties to eliminate discrepancies. 

But let's be real, with large-scale operations spanning thousands of trips each month, freight audits can be laborious. The complexity of logistics invoices often means hours of meticulous screening, not to mention the back-and-forth of the reconciliation process.

With such extensive operations, freight-related invoicing and billing discrepancies are naturally expected. Let’s delve deeper into some challenges and learn how a potent freight invoicing and reconciliation software can help solve them.

Challenges in Freight Invoicing and Reconciliation

1. Incorrect invoicing: Freight carriers and courier companies often raise invoices with erroneous charges or fail to comply with the contracted terms for service delivery. Recognition of these anomalies can enable companies to claim refunds, save significantly on shipping costs, and ensure accurate parcel tracking.
   
   

2. Laborious manual process: The manual auditing of invoices is a tedious process. Typically, businesses resort to auditing by random sampling, focusing on high-cost shipments and allowing many invoicing errors to slip through, consequently losing money. The manual process requires auditing each invoice against the carrier’s quote, identifying the error(s), undertaking verification and then raising refund claims. Attempting manual freight reconciliation between invoices and quotes using Excel spreadsheets can be cumbersome, labour-intensive, and an inherently error-prone process.
   
   

3. Workforce costs: Undertaking the manual auditing of invoices against quotes for shipments requires a special team of trained freight reconciliation personnel; this will significantly add to the business’s workforce costs.
   
   

4. Weight Mismatch: Cross-verifying the shipped and transporter-provided weight is often tedious. More often than not, drawing a comparison of Actual Weight, Volumetric Weight, and Minimum Chargeable Weight to arrive at the Charged Weight is complex.
   
   

5. Zone Inaccuracy: The contracts between the shippers and parcel transporters mention the standard SLAs and the rate per KG for movements within and across zones. However, the inaccuracy in mapping the pin codes to the correct zones leads to shippers spending more than they are supposed to for shipping a parcel.

Solution: IntuParcel’s proprietary freight management software calculates invoices as per industry standards, cross-references these calculations with the bills generated by your transporter, detects any anomalies in freight invoices, and stops you from overpaying. Additionally, its provision to maintain audit-compliant records helps you store freight invoices for future reference as well.

Automation of the freight invoicing and reconciliation process helps ensure:

• The accuracy of internal financial records

• Detection of discrepancies, unauthorized payments, and fraud

• Clearing of unpaid and late invoices

• Transparency in company spending and cash flow patterns

• Assessment of the organization’s financial health

The availability of appropriate software tools for freight reconciliation has helped eliminate errors and save workforce costs. Take Intugine’s freight reconciliation module, which records all contract rules in the system and auto-calculates freight rates for each consignment as per the AWB number; this helps save the business up to 3.5% of Transportation spending and a tremendous amount of time through near-instant freight reconciliation.

Key Features – Intugine’s IntuParcel Freight Reconciliation Module

Without freight reconciliation software, businesses are forced to manually match data in invoices, quotations and contracts. The freight reconciliation module serves as the central platform for collating all this data, quickly compares what was promised to what was delivered and points out discrepancies. The key features of a freight reconciliation module include the following:

• Auto-calculation of freight based on courier contracts.

• An error-free system that eliminates the chance of human errors while auditing invoices and contracts.

• Collects data across couriers and helps with vendor selection based on set parameters to get the best deal for the business; businesses use multiple couriers to obtain the lowest possible courier rate for a shipment. However, the more the number of couriers used, the more complex the auditing process, which is why using Intugine’s effortless freight reconciliation module makes so much sense.

• The availability of centralized data allows the collation of custom analytics and reports. For example, analytics can be undertaken to assess courier performance against contracted service levels and generate reports on performance history.

• The freight reconciliation module provides direct ROI benefits by identifying refund claims and preventing anomaly write-offs by courier companies.

• Provision to add any special charges levied on a particular shipment to increase reconciliation accuracy.
  
  

Benefits of Freight Reconciliation Software

The benefits of using freight reconciliation software include:

1. Auto-computation of freight: The software automatically calculates the payables following the contractual terms of each transporter. This can then be verified against the invoice received from the transporter.

   
   

2. Identification of billing anomalies: The software enables businesses to upload bills received from contracted transporters and identify billing discrepancies at the level of an AWB.

   
   

3. Eliminates manual efforts: The software centralises all transportation-related data and reduces the manual effort and time required to reconcile payments across multiple worksheets.

   
   

4. Enables validation: The software allows for the quick and accurate verification of accounts to ensure all records are authentic, consistent, and up to date.

   
   

5. ROIs – It can generate 3 – 5% direct ROI just by automating the reconciliation process.

Conclusion

A freight reconciliation solution eliminates the need for businesses to employ a trained workforce to audit and reconcile courier invoices to claim refunds or examine a carrier. It facilitates valuable insights from analyzing a business’s transportation data and creates significant cost-saving opportunities for the company. Intugine’s Intuparcel provides this dedicated module to help users reconcile their billings at the end of the month and get insights into the difference between the estimated fare and the actual fare. It makes parcel shipping bill payments easy for our customers and helps them focus on their business better. Get in touch with us to explore and learn more about the module.