3 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Freight Bill Processing

Freight audit payment processing is a complex and time-consuming transaction. Bulk invoices from different carriers and the challenging task of processing the payments mean you need to allocate resources, budget, and the right team to handle this tedious workload. The larger the shipment, the more bills needed to audit and prepare the payment. Thus, when invoices pile up, this can lead to errors in papers and sometimes late payments due to poor internal processes. For a successful and stress-free freight bill processing, why not hand over the responsibility to an outsourced team of experts?
The problem with in-house to no freight invoice team to process audit and pay
If you are auditing invoices in-house, well, that’s good. Let’s say you have two to three employees taking care of reviewing invoices, from checking order specifications to ensuring correct pricing and assessing rates. There are times you have thousands of freight invoices in the queue or even more than that. So, how can your three employees manage to review all that much? Let’s consider the invoices they are auditing doesn’t require additional clarification to complete, or only have minor errors. Will they be able to finish it without delays? If you think outsourcing your freight audit and payment processing will not help you as much as hiring in-house, then think again after reading these three reasons.
Three Reasons Why You Should Outsource
1. Reduce Costs
Most freight invoices consist of errors, almost 25% of them. These errors can lead to overcharged on an average of 3 to 5 percent. That’s a lot of money. Errors in invoices can be an incorrect application of rates, duplicate billing, incorrect shipper references, and more. And the most suitable time to fix an incorrect invoice is before it gets paid.
Outsourcing freight audit and payment reduce costs by making sure invoices are correct plus cutting unnecessary expensive labor costs. Inexperienced employees mostly cannot found invoices with hidden mistakes or those duplicate invoices. Furthermore, processing a freight invoice in-house includes paying for employee resources and benefits. Whereas, when you outsource you only pay for the services you consume.
2. Improve Productivity
The complexity of a freight invoice makes it difficult for an inexperienced employee to do the job expeditiously, leaving them unproductive, causing backlogs of work and costing a lot for delays. Outsourcing your freight bill processing, on the other hand, means you get access to a large scale of experts. They will efficiently process freight audits and payments as they know exactly how to handle it.
As there are multiple documents are involved in a shipment, outsourcing will also improve productivity through enhanced document management. Logistics process documents such as the bill of lading, invoices, and statements, need to be conveniently organized. The outsourced team will manage the data entry of your documents so you have detailed information on your logistics transactions than can be easily accessed.
3. Focus on Core Business Activities
Outsourcing your freight bill process allows you to focus on the most important functions or the core areas of your business. Handing over some tasks to an experienced outsourced team will remove unnecessary distractions that take away your valuable time to push your business to success. For instance, if a supply chain manager is the only one who is an expert at freight processing, and he finds himself helping the department in charge of it, thus taking away his time to manage his freight operation task. Outsourcing eliminates the need for internal resources to do the work, especially if you have limited staff and resources, where freeing up some loads will result in a prolific logistics business.