Articles

Between accounting for rising freight costs and dealing with increasingly complex invoices from multiple carriers, it’s no surprise that many companies struggle to audit their invoices and forecast future spend. This is especially true when employees are stuck using heritage systems that don’t support their current needs. Outdated freight audit and payment (FAP) procedures are a recipe for mismatched invoices and purchase orders (POs). This leads to sluggish audits, wasted time, and the potential for even more errors that can drastically increase overall freight spend. Employees don’t have time to manually compare every contract and quote with the relevant freight invoice. Instead, companies can regain control over the process while reducing current and future freight spend by utilizing reliable FAP services to track, manage, and analyze invoices.

Simple errors add up

One freight invoice exception can cause significant and costly supply chain delays. But when freight invoice exceptions and manual audits become standard operating procedure, the results are systemic inefficiencies and dramatically higher transportation costs. The good news is, most routine invoice exceptions and payment holds are caused by one of three simple errors:

• A line mismatch between the invoice and the purchase order
• Missing bill of lading documentation, including names, dates, order numbers, and descriptions
• A compliance issue

Though small, these mismatches can derail entire supply chains. Vendors and carriers are left waiting while sluggish manual invoicing and auditing procedures identify and resolve the issue, putting a strain on relationships. Staff become overburdened and burned out. Some mistakes are inevitably missed, hurting the bottom line. CTSI-Global found that on average, companies spend $5 more on every freight invoice they process and pay for on their own compared to what they would pay if they leveraged our comprehensive FAP services. Multiple that by the hundreds or thousands of invoices most companies deal with every week, and FAP services rapidly pay for themselves.

Contract management matters

Carrier contract management is an often overlooked part of FAP. However, the ability to readily access and correlate shipping contract data for review encourages accountability for every purchase order. The increased visibility also makes it easier to diagnose departments or shippers that regularly log frequent purchase order errors. This can empower supply chain managers to step in and take corrective actions where necessary, helping to reduce invoice mismatching at the source. The right FAP service provider can help companies scan, store, review, and analyze all their contracts in a fully customizable and compliant system. This fully prevents the possibility of paper contracts going missing whenever they’re needed, a scenario that only exacerbates delays.

A simple and lasting infrastructure fix

Simple infrastructure fixes like storing carrier contracts online can help catch countless invoice errors that would otherwise go unnoticed. In many cases, these fixes can even help prevent mistakes altogether, or at least speed up the process of resolving them. This puts money back in the bottom line faster, all while easing the burden on staff. But it takes an experienced, reliable FAP provider to make it possible. At CTSI-Global, our expert audit staff process over 5 million freight transactions every day. That’s over $12 billion in freight each year. We help with everything from auditing freight bills to reporting and analyzing the results, ensuring the companies that partner with us never pay a dime more than they should. Don’t let money slip through the cracks. Implement one game-changing infrastructure fix by tapping CTSI-Global’s wealth of FAP expertise today.