Freight Payment and Auditing Services

Let’s face it, the freight audit and pay process is one of the least favorite tasks within the logistics industry.  One would think moving freight from anywhere in the country to anywhere in the country on any given day comes with challenges that would never approach paying a bill, but that is just not the case.

Paying an invoice or getting paid for the work you have done for a company can often be more difficult than moving the freight itself.  There are several companies in the industry that specialize in this process, but there are still a number of challenges.

InTek has a unique perspective to the freight payment process because we live the challenges of the freight settlement from both sides of the equation.

From the payment side, InTek is a non-asset service provider, so many times we are at the mercy of a payment process not going well while we collect on the freight we moved for a company.

From the processing side, InTek provides managed transportation services to companies of all sizes.

From this perspective, we feel we can offer additional insight that buyers can use in their discovery and decision-making process of how they will handle the freight settlement function.  We will go through our perspective by walking you through the following topics in detail:

• Freight Audit and Payment Challenges.
• Ramifications of a Poor Freight Audit and Pay Process.
• Best Freight Audit and Pay Company Listing.
• Additional Points to Consider

Top 6 Challenges of Freight Audit & Pay

• The volume of transactions can be overwhelming because of the one-to-one relationship between shipment and invoice.
• The amount of paperwork backup required to validate the charges compounds exponentially with the volume of shipments.
• The incredible amount of detail included on an invoice and tremendous variability from carrier to carrier makes it difficult to hone in on a repeatable audit process.
• Complexity of freight rates, along with various fuel charge and accessorial matrixes that are often not uniform across all carriers.
• The number of approvals required often cause paperwork to get lost in the cycle.
• The number of emails and phone calls associated with payment, whether collecting on an invoice or correcting an invoice often causes confusion with email-after-email that seems to run through an infinite loop without resolution in site.

Ramifications of a Poor Freight Audit and Pay Process

• Studies indicate the average invoice error rate in the freight industry is 5% to 8%, so if the freight settlement is not handled properly then a company risks spending more because of the errors.
• The carrier – shipper relationship can deteriorate because the carrier is not getting paid.
  • At some point, the carrier will refuse to pick-up freight because the shipper goes beyond credit terms.
• The credit score will be put under pressure because the carrier will report slow and no pay issues to the credit industry, which will make it difficult to find carriers to move the freight.

Prefer your “best ofs” in video form? Check out our similarly titled video, the Best Freight Audit and Pay Companies:”