Why You Should Consider a Freight Audit Software Solution?

When shipping is an integral part of your organization, managing and processing invoices and making timely payments becomes a critical task. 

It is crucial that you have a system in place that ensures visibility over freight invoice processing and payments. When done right, it will become an opportunity to save costs and ensure process efficiencies. 

Unfortunately, financial clarity into the supply chain has long been a challenge that professionals have failed to overcome. Manual, paper-based freight audits and payments are bound to get tedious, costly and time-consuming. However, no more. 

But the emergence of freight bill audit software has made seamless, accurate and efficient audits possible. 

Why is Freight Bill Audit and Pay (FBAP) important? 

Freight Bill Audit and Pay is an essential component of any export-import oriented business. However, despite several advancements in this space, companies are reluctant to leverage technology to match invoices and process payments, resulting in a lost opportunity to save costs.

The old way of manually processing freight invoices and assuming that not much can go wrong can cost businesses big money. 

Industry studies reveal that freight invoice processing costs around $5 to $12 per invoice. Worst yet, the process is mundane, time-consuming and prone to errors. Add this to the sheer volume of invoices, and it’s clear how costly the process can get. 

Primarily if your organization deals with hundreds of invoices every month, effectively managing paperwork can be exhausting, and errors can be inevitable in several cases. 

Besides, many companies do not have sufficient resources to audit every bill, and random checks can often be misleading. In such cases, problems such as overpayments, hidden fees,  duplicate payments or redundant costs due to delayed payments are bound to happen.

Key Features of a Freight Audit and Pay Software

Implementing a system that automates your freight auditing and payment can enable you to resolve multiple issues effectively. Let’s take a look at what a freight auditing system does:-

Optical Character Recognition (OCR): 

An intelligent freight audit and payments system highlights inconsistencies between the invoice and your original quotation through a combination of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, contextual language processing and algorithmic programming. This ensures accurate matching of invoices with your initial quotation and optimizes the quality of the audit.

Create invoices:

Shippers tend to choose in-house auditing to have control over their financial management. The system you choose should be able to generate and save invoices within the stipulated time frame. 

Auto-Rating:

The software should be intelligent enough to audit invoices at the level of each line item. It should distinguish between consolidated and single-item shipments and efficiently cross-check the billed rates with the contracted rates.

Reports and analytics:

You must invest in a software that can generate reliable reports based on accurate data analysis. The system should be capable of analyzing trends, and give an overview of the number of invoices generated, processed and simultaneously keep track of payments. 

Seamless integration:

Your new system needs to complement the existing IT structure of your organization. Before you go ahead and invest in a solution, make sure that it can be integrated with your current systems seamlessly. In case there’s a failure on this front, it will do more harm than good. 

Lastly, don’t lose track of your critical reasons behind adopting the software. Have a clear picture of why you are choosing a particular software, what problems it will solve and how well it will suit your existing systems. 

Automate invoice processing with GoComet’s invoice reconciliation system 

GoComet’s automatic invoice reconciliation module helps you reduce the inefficiencies in invoice processing by 76% and saves 80% of the time taken to match invoices.

The module is built to match your freight invoices to your original contracts and immediately highlights any inconsistencies to your vendor. The system effectively saves you the trouble to follow up with your vendors in person each and every time there is an error. 

In the global trade space, efficient freight audit and payments can help you gain a competitive edge by eliminating unnecessary costs and ensuring transparency in transactions. 

These solutions can help you identify possible errors and free up your teams to focus on more meaningful work and enhance overall efficiency. Needless to say, if logistics is critical to your business, one cannot emphasize enough the need for efficient and accurate billing, data analysis, and process optimization. 

If you would like to automate your invoice processing and ensure transparent audits, get in touch with us here and learn more about how GoComet can help.