Unlocking Efficiency: Leveraging Accounts Receivable Automation in the Broker Back Office

Accounts receivable automation is becoming a business essential, as getting cash in the door quickly can be a matter of survival for freight brokerages.

“Convoy didn’t run out of business. There were plenty of people that wanted to move their freight with Convoy. Convoy didn’t run out of trucks. Convoy didn’t run out of technology; they didn’t run out of people. They ran out of cash in the bank,” Upwell co-founder and CEO Charley Dehoney said recently on The Freight Coach podcast with Chris Jolly.

Dehoney was referring to the demise of a digital freight brokerage that had once been an industry golden child. The company raised a reported $928 million in equity and venture debt and garnered a $3.8 billion valuation before nose-diving and shuttering in October 2023.

The Role of Accounts Receivable Automation

How to get paid faster to increase cash flow is a particularly difficult problem for freight brokers to figure out.

“I’ve seen across all these asset classes the No. 1 thing that companies can do to increase their value is to clean up their financials. The more working capital that’s not sitting in your bank account that’s sitting in your customer’s or prematurely sitting in your carrier’s, if you have that money in your account, you can do something with it that pays your rent, that pays your headcount,” Dehoney told Jolly.

Upwell has figured it out, automating accounts receivable to help increase freight brokerages’ working capital. Our world-class applications plug right into existing transportation management systems and accounting systems for streamlined and efficient brokerage back offices.

Three Ways Upwell Enhances Efficiency Through AR Automation

At Upwell, our team has learned by studying back-office workflows and diving into the streams of information flowing between data systems that humans are spending too much time just moving information around. Most freight brokerages don’t have teams of software engineers building connections between disparate back-office systems.

“We’re bringing that back-office intelligence, the best practices that the best companies out there are using, we’re bringing that into everybody’s office using our software,” Dehoney said.

Streamlined Invoice Generation

“There’s a massive amount of risk tied up in your billing and collections process today,” Dehoney said on the podcast. “When you’ve got a thousand customers that owe you $10,000 each, that’s death by a thousand cuts – that’s Monopoly money until it hits your account. So that’s what we’re here to do – to make sure that the customer gets the invoice on time every time, it’s accurate, it’s complete, it’s thorough, and they’ve got no reason to hang up your cash. And, if they trust the invoice, they can just dump their ACH information in and pay you automatically.”

Supported by powerful artificial intelligence, Upwell enables freight brokerages to automatically bill shippers, process remittances, and pay carriers. Upwell has revolutionized freight invoicing by automating repetitive tasks and eliminating human error. From pre-auditing invoices to ensure accuracy to streamlining payment collections, Upwell’s invoice-to-income software improves cash flow while reducing overhead.

Upwell improves the invoicing process with our Last Check, which leverages large language models to pre-audit invoices to ensure each one is accurate and complete before it leaves freight brokerages’ systems. Our Distribution Automation feature automates invoicing and ensures each invoice reaches its destination the way customers require, whether that’s via EDI, API, email, or directly into online portals.

Automated Payment Processing

Upwell has revolutionized the payment reconciliation process. Our Online Payment Portal & Options feature gives customers a variety of payment methods through a secure, easy-to-use online portal. Our Cash Application/Remittance Processing feature ensures that payments quickly find their matching invoices, turning what used to be a tedious manual process into a simple, seamless, secure, and error-free task.

Automated payment processing with Upwell saves employees time, reduces errors, provides real-time insights into payment statuses and cash flow trends, and accelerates scalability by increasing transaction volumes as well as overall back-office efficiency.

Reducing AR Balances

Accounts receivable teams often find themselves manually tracking down payments, a process that consumes valuable time and risks straining valuable customer relationships. Upwell’s Automated Statements & Payment Reminders feature allows freight brokerages to set up automated, customizable, and strategically timed payment reminders.

Our efficiency-boosting tools also include exception management, which identifies, addresses, and resolves exceptions in accounts receivable processes in seconds, as well as real-time integrations with a host of TMS, ERP, and accounting platforms.

Upwell’s AR Automation Improves Back-Office Efficiency

Upwell is an invoicing and accounts receivable automation platform designed specifically for logistics and trucking. We help freight brokerages process payments faster by automating the tedious tasks that bog down the back office. From pre-auditing invoices to ensure accuracy to streamlining payment collections, Upwell’s back-office software improves freight brokers’ cash flow while reducing overhead.

Our back-office software automates legacy processes, enabling large freight brokerages to immediately accept payments and access extra capital. By utilizing AI, freight brokerages can quickly resolve invoice exceptions that are keeping them from getting paid.

Upwell removes the pressure of accounts receivable from brokerages’ back offices and provides the key to increasing efficiency and getting cash in the door faster.  

Get an Upwell demo today.

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