Freight payment, also called freight audit and payment, refers to specialized systems and processes that manage high volumes of freight invoices and deliver deep business intelligence about all freight costs. These systems automate and fully integrate the following processes:
Processing 36 million invoices and more than $38 billion in freight spend in 2023, Cass is the leading provider of freight payment solutions. Since the beginning, with its FreightPay® services more than 60 years ago, the world’s largest shippers continue to choose Cass for the following reasons:
If you have a large freight spend, putting a freight payment solution in place is necessary to effectively manage your costs. At Cass, the benefits of a sophisticated freight payment solution go far beyond process efficiency.
Cost savings
Eliminate overpayments and get an unprecedented understanding of your transportation costs.
Efficiency
Improve invoice processing, audits, accounting, payment, and carrier inquiries
Visibility
Get a detailed, comprehensive view of all costs for all shipment types, modes, and geographies
Some of the TMS solutions have tacked on freight audit and payment capabilities in recent years. Despite this, however, the number of shippers outsourcing the process continues to rise. This is the result of two trends occurring with in-house solutions.
First, TMS/ERP systems cannot handle the complexity that companies are requiring of them. We have seen shippers try to implement their TMS, thinking an all-in-one solution was the answer, but abandon their projects due to a lack of capabilities. If they are not functionally deficient when they go live, they become so quickly, as companies realize that what they built does not accommodate their needs.
Secondly, few companies with in-house systems are dedicating the resources necessary to keep up with their evolving operations. Too often, the longer an in-house freight payment system is in place, the more it atrophies.
Adequate IT and transportation resources aren’t dedicated to their maintenance, much less improvement. Companies also lack the expertise to design and maintain a truly superior system.
Many freight payment providers offer additional services that improve the value proposition and create an exceedingly impressive ROI. At Cass, for instance, some of these include access to a benchmarking database and a variety of financial management options.
The delivery of a freight payment solution is a blended model of software and services. Shippers will understand that any logistics management software requires constant care and feeding - to respond to business changes, new rates or carriers, and to support constant process improvement.
