What is Freight Audit Software?

“. . . CFO’s rated adaptability to new technologies as the top skill for new hires.” – Financial Executives International

Technology continues to change the way we do business. Data analysis and predictive modeling skills are quickly becoming requirements, as opposed to oddities, as more and more SAAS (Software as a Service) offerings in the marketplace replace manual processes at every level. In today’s fast paced business world, it’s not what you know, but can you handle what’s coming next?

The logistics industry is no different. One area where technology is quickly overhauling best practices around the globe is how companies deal with their freight shipments. Freight audit software is a growing segment of many advanced logistics platforms, and quickly becoming one of the most important pieces of any supply chain optimization project. If implemented and integrated properly, the right freight audit software can allow your business to seamlessly pull any number of freight invoices from multiple carriers, and then accurately audit them against separate agreements in seconds, finding over-charges down to the penny level.

Besides allowing for the electronic transfer and storage of freight bills and other shipping data, modern freight audit software can also comb through each invoice line by line, looking for rate errors or incorrect accessorial charges, and then easily organize those findings into easy to read, actionable data. The highly valued supply chain experts of the not-so-distant future will be trained in data visualization and analytical reasoning in order to harness these new data sets, and will be tasked with providing useful insights, instead of just crunching numbers and moving manual processes along. This technology is helping companies everywhere take control of their own freight shipments, and in today’s complex and diversified supply chain, that matters more than ever.

Benefits of Freight Audit Software

This digital innovation in freight shipping isn’t simply change for change’s sake. Utilizing freight audit software to move away from manual processing, or worse, from not auditing at all, has massive upsides for your company:

• Processing Costs

In 2002, Ernst and Young reported that the true cost of just processing a freight bill was $12.42 per invoice, and that figure has likely only gone up since then. If a company has dozens, or hundreds of freight bills coming in every month, that can very quickly add up. Freight audit software can help cut those processing costs to almost nothing, by automating and digitizing the entire process, eliminating unnecessary administrative costs and speeding up payment times.

• Efficiency

Besides saving money with electronic automated processing, businesses can also save on time and effort by eliminating the tedious task of manually auditing their freight bills. Speeding up the audit process can help establish more accurate financial projections and budgets, and also help your employees get back to doing something more productive.

• Accuracy

Everyone makes mistakes, and that’s why minimizing the chances for human error throughout the audit process is so important. Utilizing freight audit software to electronically transfer digital copies of freight bills from each and every one of your carriers into a central hub that can then scan them against existing agreements, line by line, in a matter of seconds, is the best way to ensure that nothing is slipping through the cracks of your supply chain.

• Savings

As we said, everyone makes mistakes, including freight carriers. Accurately auditing your freight invoices, in a timely manner, is the only way to ensure that not only can you find any rate errors or unexpected costs, but that you can follow up on them appropriately. A conservative estimate of savings using an expert freight audit is 4% of your overall freight spend, and savings that size can make a massive difference to any company’s bottom line.

The Future of Freight

Going forward, as supply chains around the world continue to grow in scale, complexity and connectivity, businesses will start to devalue esoteric knowledge and manual labor. Instead, the most robust and competitive supply chains will harness advanced technology platforms that can digitally link disparate informational silos from across the globe, in order to provide real time, actionable data, that will allow decision makers to move beyond just reacting to issues, and instead, anticipate and adjust to information before problems can even arise.

This isn’t science fiction, or wishful thinking. The freight audit software offered by FreightOptics is just one way in which the Digital Revolution is reshaping the logistics industry, and helping businesses everywhere improve their processes to save time and money. In the fast-paced business world of today, simply staying afloat no longer gets the job done. If you’re not moving forward, your company is drowning . . . and you may not even know it yet.

If you are ready to join the revolution, reach out to us for a Free Demo, and start moving forward today.