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5 Steps to Streamline Cargowise Accounting Operations
As a freight forwarder, your team spends a lot of time transcribing invoices and reconciling account discrepancies. When invoices pile up, your accounts become unorganized and you risk expensive accounting errors. It’s impossible for a freight forwarding business to scale effectively if its accounting practices aren’t modernized with automation. If you haven't assessed your accounting operations in Cargowise, you may have an outdated system in place.
Recent technology makes it easier to streamline accounting operations. With a more efficient process, you can improve accuracy and avoid wasting human resources. Not only will these improvements lower your costs, but automation can also improve your relationships with customers and vendors.
For many freight forwarding companies, the process of entering, auditing and reconciling accounting data (like bills and invoices) is tedious. Advanced digitalization systems can be used to read, upload and classify your data—saving you hundreds of manpower hours that can be better spent on other tasks.
It’s time to create a better accounting process in Cargowise. You can reduce the human resources needed for bookkeeping, improve your accuracy and avoid overcharges when you streamline your accounting operations in Cargowise. While learning new technology may seem like a huge hassle, a better process will save you hundreds of hours over the next year.
Software capabilities have become very advanced, accurate, and user-friendly. These features are already available and ready for your team to implement. Here are five quick steps to make artificial intelligence (AI) and automation work for you.
Out of the Box Accounting Automations in Cargowise:
Automated cost and revenue calculations in Cargowise make it easier to create quotes. You can reduce manual processes here by using Cargowise to automatically cross-check carrier pricelists and provide real-time rates with a direct feed from carriers. As you find costs, company tariffs, and client rates, you can store them in Cargowise to apply them to future jobs with the click of a button. You can also include the correct tax treatment for whatever part of the globe you are working in.
Another option is to use the quickly calculate option for a standard charge code in Cargowise.
This makes it easier to bill customers for each job, reducing potential errors that often occur with manual data entry. Automating each job makes the process faster and more convenient for your team. The automated data entry also ensures your charges are billed correctly and you avoid unnecessary losses.
Cargowise can automatically post all charges included under a job. When you automate this process, you are able to clearly see the costing calculations and ratings for each job without opening each item individually. This might sound like a small task, but it adds up over time for your team as they try to reconcile the accounts.
Your customers will also benefit from a consistent approach that improves transparency and offers more insight. With clarified charges clearly posted to each job, shippers can see exactly what they are paying for.
In Cargowise, you will have the option to post local client charges, overseas agent charges, revenue changes, disbursement charges, and more. Once you’ve posted an invoice, the charges will be greyed out and a column will clearly indicate the posted status.
Cargowise also offers tools to simplify the invoice payment process. You can manage how customers receive invoices or credit. The platform makes it easier to understand who owes what amount to which group for each job.
The more you can streamline your invoicing process, the faster financial transactions will occur, and you can reconcile your accounts. Your accounting process will be more automated with Cargowise when you configure your account to check invoice accuracy and compliance.
Then, establish automatic emails or faxes to be sent to the selected customer contacts responsible for paying. In a similar way, you can also schedule automated emails to send financial documents, credit notes, adjustment notes and more. Once you have it set up, it’s easy to continue using the same workflow template to automate these updates and reminders.
Additional Expedock Solutions to Streamline Cargowise Accounting Operations:
You are likely facing several different document types, including invoices in email, paper form, Excel spreadsheet and PDF. You can make your data entry process so much faster when you implement Expedock for your Cargowise accounting. Rather than have a team transcribe these invoices into Cargowise, you can use AI-powered data digitalization software to do it quickly and accurately.
Expedock has the ability to analyze documents and determine their classification as vendor invoices, bills, packing lists and more. It is able to pull out the important data points and correctly enter them into a structured list for consistent organization. Each item will also be attached to the correct account and job estimate. Expedock will even match invoice line items with the correct charge codes using the descriptions.
By automating your e-doc uploading, your team saves a lot of time that would otherwise be spent on opening documents and skimming them to find the right data points for Cargowise. Manually entering invoice information increases the risk of error, which could cost a lot of time and money.
Automating freight invoice auditing and posting makes it easier to quickly reconcile discrepancies in your books. We know how important it is to get every detail correct. A single mistake could cost you thousands of dollars. Expedock guarantees a 99.97% accuracy rate.
Using Expedock, you will be able to instantly audit your uploaded invoices against initial accruals. Additional fees and charges can then be verified with the vendor before you charge your customer for the difference. If you notice a pattern of unexpected costs with a particular vendor, you can adjust your accruals for future estimates.
Not only can the audit process reduce accidental overcharges that cause a loss for you, but it can also help protect your customer relationships. Regularly passing along unidentified line items and charges from your vendor can create a confusing and frustrating customer experience. You can avoid over-charging and unclear bills by establishing an automation process to catch discrepancies for you.
Your customers value transparency. Your due diligence in catching and checking inconsistencies will help build lasting shipper relationships.
For your line of work, clarity and accuracy in every job are essential. There are too many moving parts in the supply chain to leave gaps in your billing and tracking process. Automating your accounting operations can improve every touchpoint where your customers are concerned.
The shift to remote work has only caused an increase in purchase decisions and a need for efficient account management. Streamlining your processes can reduce unnecessary charges that occur with slow turnaround times and late account reconciliation.
Not only will your customers benefit from the clarity, but your company will also be able to see data points and line items at a glance. An improved automated workflow means you have access to real-time data without overtaxing your team.
For most of the businesses we serve, manually processing accounts takes 2 – 4 hours every day just for invoice processing. Additional time was spent on bill processing. This is a huge waste of your human resources. Machines can handle the mundane tasks of data entry and account auditing. Automation takes care of redundant tasks that don’t need human insight or creativity.
Just two hours of your time can save you 60 hours of manpower in the next month.
Our team is dedicated to getting you set up on Expedock as quickly as possible. Once you’re ready to roll, your team can spend less time on data entry and more time on tasks that are important to your company. Use your newfound manpower resources to connect with customers, follow up with promising leads or spend time developing additional revenue-generating channels.
Our customers report a 30% increase in volume and upsell because their teams were freed up from data entry busywork and able to focus on sales.
Are you ready to save time and improve your accounting accuracy? We can help. Contact us today for a consultation and demo.
Let us help you optimize business processes and deliver unrivaled customer experience to your clients.
