The best freight audit software is not optional anymore. Auditing your freight bills, eliminating overcharges, and gaining transparency into your data is absolutely essential to managing your freight costs. By replacing inefficient invoice management processes with automation, you’ll eliminate your bill auditing time and you’ll gain a level of transparency into your costs that allows you to track, report, allocate and accrue costs, and much more. One reason outsourcing freight audit and payment is so attractive is that annual freight costs for a typical client range from tens of millions to over a billion dollars. Freight invoices are complicated and full of charges, so error rates are high. This makes freight audits highly desirable and profitable.
Freight Audits Enable Contract Compliance
A freight audit is a systematic examination of all invoices paid by an organization to determine whether or not they were correctly billed. It is a process that looks at the validity of each invoice, and the quality of the data used in creating them. A freight audit ensures that all of your payments are correct, and that you are not paying duplicate payments. Freight audit and payment is a highly-regulated industry. As a result, you can be held liable for non-compliance of your company’s contractual obligations. There are many ways in which a freight audit could save you money.
Achieve High Automation in Freight Audit, Payment and Reporting
Automation is the key to reducing the cost of a freight audit and payment solution. This is because the audit process is largely paperless. For example, most freight bills include a large amount of detail about the shipment, the carrier, the freight forwarder, and the shipper. This level of detail has traditionally been manually entered into invoices and payment documents. An automated solution will allow you to automate this process, so that it can be done in a fraction of the time that would otherwise be required. For example, if you could replace 50% of your freight invoice processing with automation, that is a major cost saving. In addition, a freight audit and payment solution allows you to reduce your spend on accountants and auditors.
Taking Freight Payment Around the Globe
Freight payments are often processed at the point of origin, and then forwarded to the receiving organization. This means that a freight invoice must be paid at two different locations, and then sent back to the receiving location. The additional costs of sending the bill multiple times, and the potential for error are all reasons why an automated freight audit and payment solution can save you money. A freight audit and payment solution will also reduce your risk of non-compliance. This is because it will provide you with the visibility into your freight spend that you need to understand your contractual obligations, and ensure that you are not paying duplicate bills or overcharging. Freight Audit & Payment Solutions Are Here to Stay As the freight industry continues to grow, freight audit and payment solutions will only become more popular.
