Introducing Shipium Billing Management

Invoicing and billing accuracy are critical aspects of your outbound fulfillment strategy. These processes have a widespread business impact across areas like cost control, cash flow, customer trust and more. For LSPs in particular, invoicing and billing accuracy underpin the margin strategies that drive profitability and business growth. 

For these reasons, we’re excited to announce Shipium’s Billing Management — a solution that’s purpose-built to help shippers bill faster and more accurately to support cost and error reduction, as well as margin strategies for LSPs. 

In this post, we’ll provide an overview of our Billing Management solution and explore how it supports high impact use cases for companies handling their own fulfillment as well as LSPs who are shipping on behalf of their customers. 

It starts with streamlined invoicing

Inaccurate invoicing limits the ability to control costs, and can significantly damage profits in the long run if it’s not carefully managed. 

Invoicing inaccuracies also lead to billing inaccuracies, which negatively impact customer relationships and lead to excessive time and effort being spent on reconciliation. Put simply, you can’t bill your customers without having a thorough understanding of your final costs. 

Shipium Billing Management helps shippers combat these challenges by offering streamlined integration and automated ingestion of carrier invoices. The product leverages flexible methods for integration  — API, EDI, SFTP etc. — depending on what carriers make available. Invoices are then organized into a standardized feed that presents total costs (including surcharges & accessorials) that enables shippers to analyze final costs against the execution rate that was established during the rate shop process. 

It’s worth noting that Shipium offers solutions that augment this type of invoice analysis. First, our Carrier Selection API powers more accurate rate shopping by comparing fully-loaded rates (including surcharges & accessorials) to ensure that shippers always select the cheapest carrier and service method that will meet their desired delivery date. Additionally, once shipments are executed and invoices are received, our Analytics Suite allows shippers to create customized dashboards that detail discrepancies between shipment execution and invoice costs on a macro-level. 

Common use cases for our Invoice Management functionality include: 

• Discrepancy identification: The automated ingestion and standardization of invoices allows operators to use Shipium’s intuitive UI to identify rate mismatches, additional surcharges, duplicate billing and other factors that contribute to increased costs relative to the selected execution rate for each shipment. 
• Improved shipping strategies: Invoice vs. execution comparison sheds light on ways that shipping strategies can be adjusted to curb costs, including upstream address validation, shipment consolidation, and rate negotiation with carriers.
• Cost analysis and control: When invoice data feeds reporting, it can help shippers analyze costs over time. Shippers can track cost-per-parcel, compare carrier costs, measure invoice accuracy, and identify cost-saving opportunities with this type of visibility.

The Invoice Management aspect of the broader solution is useful for both direct shippers and LSPs, who can both benefit from the automation and visibility provided.

Support for faster billing and more profitable margin strategies

For LSPs, Shipium’s Billing Management solution creates additional value in the form of accelerated billing cycles, improved cash flow, and greater profitability.

First, operators can streamline customer invoice generation directly in Shipium’s Console, configuring properties like tenant, origin, billing frequency, and markups (more on this below). Timely generation of accurate invoices creates stronger cash flow and reduces time spent on invoice processing.

Granular configuration of sell rate sheets is another high-value aspect of Shipium’s Billing Management solution. Operators can leverage the solution to apply a flat or percentage based increase to base rates and configure rates by weight or zone. You can also apply such markups to existing carrier surcharges / accessorials depending on contracted (buy) and presented (sell) pricing. By mapping created sell rates to buy rates, Shipium also provides margin visibility down to the individual shipment level.

The most common use case we have seen for this functionality in our discussions and work with customers is the creation of unique margin strategies that improve the profitability of shipping operations. The two most common strategies are detailed below.

Modern 1-1 markup

This strategy is deployed when an LSP’s end customers dictate which carriers and service methods should be used for fulfillment. Whether the buy rates used are the customer’s or LSP’s contracted carrier rates, this strategy involves the application of markups directly to each service method. 

As detailed above, markups can be applied to base rates, surcharges / accessorials, by weight, by zone, or custom.

Branded shipping services

The other common strategy that we’re seeing LSPs deploy is the creation of their own unique shipping services, which are underpinned by their preferred carriers and service methods. This method is deployed when LSPs control carrier and service selection. 

In this case, the services offered aren’t directly tied to carriers and service methods. Instead, LSPs offer a custom fulfillment option that’s bound by an SLA (ex. Delivery within 3 days), then execute shipments using the cheapest carrier and service method that will meet that SLA. This is all enabled by the creation of custom sell rate sheets, configuration of custom surcharges, the ability to map sell rates to buy rates, and Shipium’s ML-powered time-in-transit predictions.

Wrapping up

Shipium’s Billing Management solution is designed to help shippers improve accuracy, analyze the primary drivers of costs, and deploy strategies to reduce them. 

On the LSP side, the solution can also be used to support the implementation of more profitable margin strategies through the flexible configuration of markups and sell rates. When the LSP dictates carrier and service selection, they can also opt to further build margin by creating branded shipping services that are SLA-bound, and can be consistently executed using the lowest-cost carriers and services that meet the dates promised to customers. 

If faster, more accurate billing, improved cash flow, and increased shipping profitability are on your roadmap, book a consultation with our team to determine if Shipium Billing Management is the right fit for your operations.