The operator behind this one ran freight at a scale where small reconciliation gaps add up quietly and dangerously. Movements were planned in one system, billed in another, and settled with carriers in a third, with the general ledger downstream of all of them. The result was a permanent low-grade disagreement: customer invoices that did not always reflect what had moved, carrier costs that landed in the ledger without a clean link to the job, and a finance team that spent its days reconciling rather than reporting.
Nobody could say with confidence, at any given moment, what a lane had actually earned or cost. The numbers existed; they just never tied back to the shipments that generated them.
The challenges we had to solve
- Billing and freight settlement running on separate systems, so revenue and cost for the same movement were never reconciled at source.
- Carrier invoices that had to be matched against agreed rates and the actual movement, with disputes handled rather than absorbed.
- A general ledger that received costs and revenue without a clean trace back to the job that caused them.
- No reliable way to see the margin on a lane or a customer until well after the period had closed.
How we approached it
We anchored everything to the movement. Each shipment became the unit that revenue, carrier cost and ledger postings all hang from, so that billing the customer and settling the carrier draw on the same record rather than two parallel ones. Freight settlement was built to match carrier invoices against the agreed rate and the actual movement, flagging the exceptions for someone to handle instead of letting them seep silently into the cost base.
With revenue and cost both tied to the job, the postings to the general ledger carried that link with them. We reconciled the new flow against historical periods before cutover, making sure the system’s revenue and cost for past movements agreed with what had already been reported, so finance could trust it from the first live period.
Where it stands
Billing, settlement and the ledger now reconcile to the same movements, so the finance team has gone back to reporting instead of forensics. The operator can look at a lane or a customer and see what it genuinely earned, while the period is still current rather than weeks after it closed.