To speed cash flow, more fleets are using document management systems to automate billing.
Months before the recent mortgage meltdown hit Wall Street, the trucking industry already was facing a credit crunch of its own when fuel prices surged to new records. Carriers essentially provide shippers with interest-free loans the moment a truck is dispatched and fueled. Before deregulation – when everything had to be done with paper, postage and, usually, typewriters – the Interstate Commerce Commission required shippers to pay freight bills within seven days. But now carriers pay for fuel in cash – typically by the next day – and often consider themselves lucky to receive payment for freight and fuel surcharges 45 days after delivering loads.
Carriers may not be able to control how long shippers take to pay their freight bills, but they can control how quickly customers get them. Because most shippers require proof-of-delivery documents prior to paying invoices, scanning and imaging systems can help process billing documents faster.
When document imaging systems emerged in the early 1990s, the cost of hardware – scanners and data storage – together with software licensing put the technology beyond the reach of most carriers.
Hardware costs have fallen precipitously since then. In-house software remains a big investment, but many vendors now offer Web-based software systems that sidestep the cost of software licenses. Combined with remote scanning and other outsourcing services, most document imaging systems and services are scalable to any fleet.
While document scanning isn’t new, vendors have developed new ways to automate and speed the delivery of invoices to customers – often within moments of delivering a load. And some carriers already are flirting with what many see as the inevitable solution – skipping paper altogether and billing based on a fully electronic proof-of-delivery process.
Managing the images
For many fleets, the big question is whether document imaging truly can make them more efficient. If the system merely digitizes existing processes – especially through cumbersome scanning of documents in the office – then a payback may be limited. The key issues are getting billing documents into the system quicker and managing them more efficiently once they are there.
