TransmetriQ® — A Railinc® brand and leader in rail shipment visibility — today announced the launch of Freight Payables. This new module automates rail freight invoice audits, helping carload shippers meet increasingly rigorous audit requirements while improving billing accuracy and reducing waste.
Rail shippers are operating in an environment where freight spend is facing greater scrutiny than ever. Logistics and transportation teams are under increasing pressure to improve cost transparency, ensure billing accuracy and eliminate unnecessary waste. As a result, there is growing focus on making the strict audit process more efficient through automated invoice review and less manual work.
The Freight Payables module enables operations and accounting teams to collaboratively ensure every invoice matches what was negotiated, and that freight spend is not quietly leaking through manual errors. TransmetriQ’s shipper customers consistently described the same three problems:
Working directly with shippers, TransmetriQ identified a clear gap in the market: most solutions are designed to serve either transportation teams or accounting teams, even though both have freight payables processes and audit requirements. Freight Payables bridges that divide by providing real-time visibility into the freight payment process and facilitating collaboration across these functions, while automating the work needed to identify billing errors, meet audit requirements and reduce unnecessary costs.
“Our data shows that audits processed by hand miss errors on freight bills and accessorial charges. We have caught more than 20 different kinds of invoice errors — ranging from fuel and tariff rate mismatches to missing origins and invoice numbers—that were costing shippers time and money,” said Danny Dever, Sr. Product Manager, Shipments & Visibility, TransmetriQ. “Before Freight Payables, there was no system available that offered the full scope of functions that audit processes require, and that gap is what has been driving up resourcing costs for shippers.”
That gap is widest in shipments billed under Rule 11, an AAR rule for interline moves that cross multiple railroads. Instead of one through rate, each carrier in a Rule 11 move sets and bills its own rate for its portion of the route, all under a single bill of lading. A shipment crossing three railroads can generate three separate invoices, each needing its own check against the agreed rate. Rule 11 gives shippers pricing transparency and negotiating leverage, but it multiplies the work behind the scenes. For shippers operating at scale, reconciling those shipments by hand has become one of the most time-consuming tasks in freight payment.
“Rule 11 invoices pose additional audit challenges. Many shippers’ accounting teams require that every invoice for a Rule 11 shipment be received before any payment can be made. This enables shippers to audit the full cost of a shipment, but it leads to backlogs and late payments if one railroad invoices before another,” says Dever. “TransmetriQ prevents that backlog by auditing each segment of the Rule 11 move instead of the overall move from origin to destination. This also provides clarity on which invoice should be disputed when multiple invoices are associated with a Rule 11 move.”
At the core of Freight Payables is TransmetriQ’s Shipment Rating tool, a continuously updated record of a shipper’s negotiated rates and public tariffs. Freight Payables checks every incoming invoice against that record as it arrives; flags anything that does not match; and routes it into one shared workflow where finance and operations can review, approve or dispute the charge together without spreadsheets or email chains. The result is a continuous, real-time audit process that identifies discrepancies as they occur rather than after the fact.
As greater scrutiny is placed on how freight dollars are spent and where waste can be eliminated, Freight Payables is a natural fit within TransmetriQ’s portfolio of solutions designed to help shippers reduce unnecessary spend and improve financial efficiency. Learn more about Freight Payables here.