Most brokerages wish their team could stay entirely focused on finding new customers, loads, and other business growth activities - not getting bogged down in back-office tasks. A recent industry survey found that 78% of brokers think their back-office operations take too much time, and 52% say they spend over 480 hours a year on just the back-office.
Yet when brokerages don’t have the right tools and systems in place to scale their back-office operations alongside their sales, the whole operation crawls to a halt. This leads to expert team members shifting focus away from moving the business forward to tedious tasks like invoicing, payments, and accounting.
With Denim’s suite of back-office payment tools, brokerages like yours have cut their invoice processing time down to minutes instead of hours, reduced staff time spent on accounting, automated previously tedious back-office tasks, and more.
Below we walk through four different case studies that demonstrate exactly how Denim’s back-office can drastically improve your brokerage’s freight bill processing, invoicing, and factoring processes.
How Direct Expedite Reduced Invoice Processing Time From 2.5 Hours to 12 Minutes
Founded in 2019, Dale Prax has grown Direct Expedite to 26 employees across multiple offices, with nearly half their staff being focused on back-office operations.
Direct Expedite’s Challenges:
Direct Expedite was struggling with invoice processing time, with their old process taking a staggering 2.5 hours to process every invoice.
This inefficiency made it almost impossible to find and retain capable accounting staff, who dreaded the manual mundane data entry that the roles required. Direct Expedite knew there had to be a better way than manual invoice processing, and were seeking a factoring partner who adapted with modern technology and automation.
Denim’s Solution:
Direct Expedite was looking for a way to leverage their existing talent into other roles, but with so many staff stuck in accounting tasks, it was nearly impossible.
They decided to swap their factoring company to Denim, in the hope that our back-office solutions would help speed up their invoicing process. The switch vastly exceeded their expectations, bringing freight bill invoicing processing speeds down from 2.5 hours to just 12 minutes per load!
This one change had a cascading effect on the company, resulting in fewer calls, emails, and manual data entry for the team. As a result, employees were much happier, stayed with Direct Expedite longer, and vastly improved the hiring process.
How Roadly Reduced Accounting Time by Half:
Roadly Logistics is a growing brokerage that started out specializing in the meal kit delivery industry, and has quickly expanded to other services.
Roadly’s Challenges:
When Roadly began expanding, they quickly realized that long time frames for shipper payments and a busy accounting team meant they needed two solutions: freight invoice factoring services and invoicing automation.
They quickly realized that most old-school factoring companies were still using manual processes and emails to send invoices, leading to long email chains and slow communication for their accounting team. His team was spending far too much time chasing down payments and emailing back and forth instead of focusing on business-critical tasks.
Many of these manual processes also didn’t integrate with Roadly’s accounting software, QuickBooks. They were looking for a solution that checked all of these boxes.
Denim’s Solution:
Through Denim’s factoring services, Roadly’s accounting team was able to finally focus on moving the business forward instead of following up with customers constantly. Plus their cash flow improved, giving Roadly payments up front for invoices that would normally be delayed by 30-60 days.
Most importantly, Denim’s QuickBooks integration helped cut out all of the manual processes involved in invoicing and payments, cutting Roadly’s manual accounting time in half!
How Yeti Logistics Cut Time Spent on Back-Office Tasks by 75%
Yeti Logistics was experiencing the crunch of a slow economy, and had been forced to operate on tighter margins in recent years. Despite these economic challenges, they were determined to grow and scale their company.
Yeti’s Challenges:
In order to grow, Yeti knew they needed to cut down on the time their team spent on back-office tasks. They were struggling with their existing solution because it lacked integrations with their TMS, causing the team to constantly switch between platforms.
This wasted a huge amount of precious time for staff that were already spread thin, causing frustration across the board. This lack of integration and automation left Yeti’s team spending 3-4 hours every day just to manually enter shipment data into multiple systems, spreadsheets, and platforms.
Denim’s Solution:
Denim’s built-in integration with TMSs like the one Yeti Logistic uses, EKA, completely automated tasks that were previously manual. Instead of downloading documents, transcribing them into a spreadsheet, and then uploading that sheet into their old freight bill factoring platform, everything was done automatically at the click of a button.
Jobs were transferred seamlessly from EKA to Denim for factoring and payment, automatically. This cut down on the need for manual and repetitive data entry, audited invoices for errors, and cut down on human errors that often sneak into manual processes.
All of this automation saved Yeti 75% of the time they used to spend on back-office tasks, freeing up team members to focus on driving the business forward all while cutting down on errors and keeping customers and carriers happier than ever.
How Peregrine Cut Time Spent on Invoices Down to Under a Minute:
Peregrine is a lean and quickly growing brokerage focused on providing reliable services to shippers while maintaining strong, healthy, and respectful relationships with their carriers.
Peregrine’s Challenges:
Before working with an advanced factoring company and payment platform like Denim’s, Peregrine was using manual processes to make payments to carriers and invoice customers.
They were stuck manually downloading documents from their Transportation Management System (TMS), creating and sending freight invoices to customers via email, and managing direct payments to carriers. This manual method was extremely inefficient and error-prone, causing concerns from customers and carriers, slowing down their cash flow, and leading to frustration across the board.
They knew that to achieve their growth goals, automating some of this process would be required.
Denim’s Solution:
Peregrine found Denim when they were looking for a technology-focused freight factoring service that could adapt to their needs. They used Denim’s back-office suite and integrations to cut down on freight bill invoicing time, improving their speeds to under a minute per invoice.
This alone nearly tripled their team’s efficiency, giving them the opportunity to grow their business without adding any additional back-office staff. Plus through Denim’s use of Zapier integrations with Shipwell, jobs were seamlessly transferred between Denim and Peregrine’s TMS, further cutting down on manual data entry and error-prone tasks.
This massive leap in efficiency led Peregrine to grow to $12-15 million per month, earn an A rating on Truckstop with zero complaints from customers or carriers, and stay lean all at the same time.
Conclusion
The back-office of your brokerage is more than just mundane accounting tasks - it’s responsible for moving many parts of your business forward, and can be a huge bottleneck if not enabled by the right tools and systems.
Without proper integrations between your TMS, factoring company, and accounting software like the examples above, your back-office staff will be stuck in mundane and error-prone data-entry tasks that take forever and only cause problems. Automating these processes leads to happier customers, staff, and carriers, a more efficient business, and gives your brokerage the leverage it needs to grow.
Want to learn more about how you can be Denim’s next success story? Click here to speak with our team and get started today.
Freight Factoring Scorecard: Making the Decision to Switch
Is your factoring provider the right fit? Use our scorecard to see if it's time for a change.
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