When it comes to increasing your bottom line in the trucking industry, miles and minutes count for the majority of your budget. The quicker you can get a shipment delivered, the better. This includes getting your invoices and bills of laden to your customers in expedience. For the fuel and gas transport industry, technology offers a wealth of opportunities for money saving methods. For starters, paperless invoices shave days off how quick you can get a return on your payments for services rendered.
Using Paperless Invoices in Logistics
According to Trucking Info, paperless technologies should be more than just emails. Paperless invoices can be managed using a variety of tech systems including e-signatures and cloud-based storage along with sharing. At every step of invoicing, you can use technology to complete the process—all without ever having to print and copy a single piece of paper. That’s revolutionary.
In addition to saving money on printing costs and mailing fees, you can cut out the amount of work that goes into each and every invoice. In this industry, that time savings can help you keep customers, and your accounting department, happy.
The time when you had days or weeks to submit an invoice is long gone. Customers and clients expect to receive confirmation and a copy of your paperwork within minutes of delivery acceptance. Your long haul truck drivers and accounting departments don’t have the time needed to find a fax machine or send a bill via snail mail, even if they overnight it. Thanks to the internet and advent of e-communications, you are expected to be expedient. This is where paperless invoices in logistics serve you well.
One example of a trucking company that has gone paperless is noted by CCJ. The trucking company Southeastern Freight Lines is using electronic load requests and bills of lading. This allows the company’s drivers and logistics teams to submit invoices electronically. The trucking company saves time, and so does its truck drivers, and when time is money, every second counts. They report positive results from the switchover.
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When you use paperless invoicing with logistics, you have the ability to automate your system. You can create a system of inputs that reduces the amount of work that goes into every invoice. For example, your system might include something as simple as calculating the total fees in a single column. You can also automate an invoice to use set rates for loads based on geographic location.
Automatically filling out part of the form will do more than just save you time. It also cuts down on the amount of human error that occurs with invoicing. By reducing the amount of actual work that goes into each invoice, you help protect your business from costly paperwork mistakes. This saves your accounting team time on finding corrections.
Whether you are a green fleet or not, reducing your impact on the environment is a beneficial move for your business. Why not cut down on the amount of paper you are using, while saving your business money on printing costs in the process? Less paperwork also means less garbage sent out of the office. It also shaves down the amount of time office workers spend shredding documents before trashing them. So while your business looks more eco-friendly, you are also reducing the expenses of using an old fashioned paper system for invoicing.
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