Benefits Of Freight Invoice Automation
Reducing costs is a key goal for most companies. Some expenses, however, are more difficult to see than others: they remain hidden, silently eating away at your profits whilst your competitors gain a critical pricing advantage from this lapse.
The cost of manually reconciling freight invoices is a common example where organizations spending too much.
Industry studies estimate that manual invoice processing costs around $5 to $12 per invoice. It is time-consuming, prone to error, inefficient for your operations and accounts teams, and stifles productivity.
But help is at hand with GoComet’s innovative software solution: fully deployed in as little as 2 weeks, GoComet’s automation can save you up to 76% of the total time taken to reconcile your invoices.
Here’s how it works
GoComet’s software automatically matches freight invoices to your original quotations and highlights any inconsistencies. The system can even auto-approve invoices, removing the need for your team to drag their way through the mundane (yet often complicated) task of matching internal rate sheets with the bills landing on your desk.
Approximately 75% of logistics leaders believe that there are negligible discrepancies between the final quotation and invoice. Add this to the sheer volume of invoices logistics teams receive, and it’s clear that costly mistakes can, and do, happen.
From our own data, we have discovered that up to 60% of invoices do not match the final quotation. Moreover, in about 20% of the cases, these discrepancies go unchecked. Even minor errors can combine to make a huge difference to your bottom line, causing overpayment, duplicate payments, and lost productivity.
So how does GoComet help?
Once the vendor uploads the invoice on the GoComet platform, our software initiates the auto-verification process. This process is carried out through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, contextual language processing, and algorithmic programming to highlight any inconsistencies between the invoice and your originally agreed quotation.
In case of any discrepancies, our system automatically notifies the vendor as to the value of each and every line-item error. This enables the vendor to proactively rectify the mistake and re-upload the document. As a result, users save a huge amount of time as they do not need to follow up with the vendor. Only after the vendor re-uploads the rectified documents and confirms the charges, will the invoice go to the client for further processing, saving up to 76% of the total time taken when done manually.
What’s more, our system incorporates contextual matching, allowing such terms as THC, Terminal Handling charges, and Handling Charges to be recognized as one. This facilitates precision in matching and the ability to accommodate multiple formats.
And going even further, GoComet’s platform offers you to auto-approve and set your own, pre-defined tolerance levels as well as integrate with your finance department’s internal systems to initiate the payment process.
The benefits of automated freight invoice matching:
- Single dashboard for matching rates
- Significant time savings compared to manual checks
- Reduces workload for your logistics team
- Auto-rejection of duplicate invoices uploaded by Logistics Service Providers
- Approval of invoices to Accounts teams with a single click
- Improved auditing process via the ability to time-stamp remarks and comments on each invoice
- Improved client-vendor relationship due to better payment cycles and full transparency
Cost-effective and Resilient
With automation to the rescue, it’s time to break free from manually processing your freight invoices and turn technology to your advantage.
If you’d like to learn more about how GoComet can help you pay less for your freight procurement, digitally track your shipments and auto-reconcile your freight invoices, contact us here. Feel free to fix a free walkthrough demo of how GoComet’s solution can help you drive double-digit cost savings in your supply chain while eliminating all the pain points you may currently face due to the lack of automation.
