Problem Fixed: When Invoices Don’t Match Their Freight Quote

  Money pens

You’re preparing a shipment. You get the weight and freight class, tack on some accessorials, then choose the origin and destination zip codes from the list of 41,000 possibilities across the country. You input this information into your TMS, which draws information from several competing databases, rounds off numbers, and returns a quote. This is your freight quote—and because of all the competing information and databases—the odds are that once you get your invoice the total will be different. That’s how you end up paying more than you were quoted.

Everyone has experienced this pain point. In fact, 90% of all invoices don’t match their initial freight quotes to the penny, and more than 30% have significant differences. These discrepancies aren’t just nuisances, they negatively impact your bottom line, and they take up valuable employee time, but it doesn’t have to happen.

Wasted Money

The entire point of a freight quote is to help you understand how much a shipment will cost before you go through with it. If you end up with a different number once the invoice comes in, it messes with accounting and can constrain your budget. The more this happens, the more constrained your budget becomes, and the less confidence you have in freight quotes.

If you assign a tolerance—or an acceptable” amount that an invoice can be higher than its initial quote—you’re basically saying it’s okay to lose money. If you choose to hire full-time employees to investigate discrepancies, you’re paying somebody for a job that shouldn’t need to be done. Either way, you are losing money because your freight quote doesn’t match your invoice.

Wasted Time

Investigating discrepancies between freight quotes and invoices is a costly, time-consuming process. You shouldn’t have to devote an employee’s time to something that can be automated. You should be paying people to help you make money, not figure out where you lost it.

The Solution: project44’s Rating API

Why decide between setting a low price tolerance and paying the difference, or setting a high tolerance and hiring full-time employees to investigate discrepancy? Just eliminate both issues all together. project44’s Ratings API cuts out the problematic steps between quoting and invoicing. The result is a fast and accurate quote with a matching invoice.

The API takes all the information—freight class, weight, accessorials, zip codes, etc.—and returns an accurate quote in real-time. The visibility throughout the shipment provides you with further optimization as well, providing a seamless process from quote to invoice. The invoice matches at the end of the process. You’re never overcharged, and you don’t have to pay a full-time employee to investigate overages.