Billing and paperwork

Money is lost in the gap between delivery and invoice

A load delivered on Tuesday and invoiced the following Monday is six days of float you gave away for nothing. Multiply it across a month and the cost of the delay is real money, and it is money you already earned.

The reason the gap exists is not laziness. It is that invoicing requires the paperwork to be complete, and the paperwork is scattered across a phone, a cab and three brokers' portals.

We close the gap by collecting the documents as the load runs rather than reconstructing them afterwards.

What is included

• Document collection — rate confirmation at booking, signed BOL and POD at delivery, chased if they do not arrive.
• Invoicing — raised the day you deliver, in the format the broker or your factor requires.
• Factor submission — packaged and submitted to your factor complete, so the advance is not held for a missing page.
• Receivables chasing — aged invoices followed up with the broker before they quietly become a write-off.
• Accessorial claims — detention, layover, TONU, lumper and reconsignment claimed and evidenced.
• Filing — everything kept against the load, so the record exists when a dispute or an audit needs it.

Detention that actually gets paid

Detention is the accessorial carriers most often earn and least often collect. It is not usually refused because the claim is wrong. It is refused because the claim is unevidenced or late.

A payable detention claim generally needs three things: the free time and detention terms as they appear on the rate confirmation, arrival and departure times you can evidence, and notice given to the broker while the truck is still sitting — not the following week.

That third item is where most claims die. A detention claim raised after the fact is a request for goodwill. One raised at hour two, in writing, against terms already agreed, is an invoice.