5 Ways an Excellent Freight Forwarding Software Saves Your Business Money

In the freight forwarding business, business owners are working on increasingly narrower margins. With a myriad of moving tasks worldwide, maintaining a healthy margin to ensure profitability is a challenge that should be top of mind for the entire organization 24/7, 365 days a year. Freight forwarders, after all, add value to their customers by helping them save on logistics costs.

Let’s rewind to 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic throwing unprecedented challenges at the supply chain, freight forwarders faced enormous roadblocks to maintaining their delicate balance. Aside from numerous restrictions on movements and other unforeseen roadblocks, such as frequent port congestion, the distribution system had to evolve in ways that placed further strain on freight forwarders. For instance, the backbone of the distribution system involved in e-commerce is different from other forms of retail. Therefore, the shift from brick-and-mortar shopping to shopping from home required major adjustments.

To stay competitive in the current landscape, freight forwarders need to do more than ensure shipments arrive as expected. They should also be able to easily keep track of costs associated with their work, such as demurrage fees, ocean freight or air freight shipping costs, cargo insurance, terminal handling charge, customs duty, and many more.

The Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Should Be User-Friendly

Personnel turnover requires new-hires to quickly learn freight forwarding tools, such as freight forwarding software. However, it is not just new hires that you need to worry about training. If you are looking to migrate from legacy systems into an automated one, you need user-friendly freight forwarding software that everyone across your organization can learn quickly. A simple layout, straightforward structure, and mobile compatibility make it easy for anyone to start using GoFreight after a brief tutorial. Moreover, intuitive freight forwarding software is crucial, not just for freight forwarding employees but also for customers.

What Does the Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Include?

Freight forwarding software is a freight logistics solution to help freight forwarding companies manage their operations efficiently. Aside from providing an easy-to-use interface to help operators, managers, and business owners look after operations, the best freight forwarding software can also produce all the documents needed, such as bills of lading and airway bills, among others. The ideal freight forwarding software should also make invoicing, quotation, payment transfers, accounting operations, and checking profit and loss statements easier, to enable relevant personnel to make timely crucial decisions once required. To achieve these tasks, freight management software should be able to manage forwarder business, control accounting status, boost team productivity, and improve operating efficiency.

How Will the Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Save Money for Freighters?

With almost half of all companies still relying on legacy systems to manage operational expenses manually, choosing the ideal freight forwarding software is the best way to get ahead of the industry’s challenges quickly. Fortunately, technology has evolved as well. Specialized software companies, especially those with experience in the freight forwarding industry, have designed the ideal software to fit any freight forwarding system regardless of scale and complexity. Here are six ways the perfect freight forwarding software can save your business money.

1. The Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Streamlines Operations

   With today’s supply chain challenges and the ever-changing shipping landscape, automating operations is every business’s best course of action. With efficient expense management tools, companies can save time and money by automating their freight forwarding system.
   
   Tasks, such as totaling the prices of services used for each customer, can be cumbersome. Especially with high personnel turnover rates, days lost in training new personnel means losing thousands of dollars worth of missed opportunities. Moreover, even seasoned employees find such routines tedious. With well-designed freight forwarding software, these tasks are made more convenient with a low training time.   
   
   An all-in-one freight forwarding solution provided by this software centralizes operations by enabling tasks, such as printing invoices, attaching receipts, and submitting approvals from the manager in a few clicks. Moreover, this tool allows relevant personnel to upload the required documents quickly.   
   
   

   Features of an ideal freight management software include the following:

   • Uploading files in the system and making these visible through a user-friendly interface

   • Tracking receipts

   • Managing expense requests

   • Scheduling reimbursements

   • Implementing company policies and spending limits

   • Routing documents, such as receipts, in an approval loop

   • Staying in sync with relevant accounting software
     
     

2. The Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Speeds Up Customer Payments

   
   

   By having your freight forwarding system centralized, you can ensure each activity involved in a project is constantly tracked. Your team will then be able to process receipts and request reimbursements and payments sooner.

   By making the process simpler and quicker, you can view the entire cost and bill your customers quicker than ever before. Your software also includes functions to enable quick payments to reduce waiting time during business-to-business transactions, which typically take time to process.
   
   

3. An Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Reduces Manual Errors
   
   

   Another benefit of automation is reducing manual errors. Compiling expenses manually is prone to miscalculations, such as misplacement of commas and basic mathematical calculation errors. Just one simple mistake could cause a considerable loss in revenue and lead to substantial accounting issues. Worse, such errors can damage your relationship with suppliers and customers, especially if your staff overlooked financial information before sending it outside the business.   

   The ideal freight forwarding software has safeguards to ensure the best visibility of all financial information, such as quotations, invoices, reimbursements, and more. Processing invoices, purchase orders, and other relevant expenses are made simpler. Moreover, each transaction is synced with existing accounting software to ensure that all the appropriate personnel in your business, including the accounting department, can keep track of everything they need.

4. The Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Can Detect and Prevent Expense Errors and Fraud
   
   

   An ideal freight forwarding software has expense management features to ensure that everything in the pipeline is looked after. With so much going on in the operations, especially with many people involved in processing information, there is an increased risk of someone salting money away from the business. With streamlined features, suspicious reports can be easily detected by you or your accounting team.
   
   

5. The Ideal Freight Forwarding Software Impresses Your Customers
   
   

   An ideal freight forwarding software has features that make all other operations streamlined, even beyond expense management. For instance, providing your customer with an easy-to-use branded portal improves customer experience. Details like this set you apart from the competition and give your business a competitive edge with prospective customers. These portals may include EDI-powered shipment data that has top-notch container and purchase order-level visibility, that go leaps and bounds beyond what legacy systems can offer.
   
   

Takeaways: GoFreight’s Freight Forwarding Software Is Your Best Option To Save Money for Your Business

GoFreight’s all-in-one freight forwarding software has all the features you need to keep track of your expenses, receipts, purchase orders, and more through well-designed expense management modules. These are easy to use and can be synced with accounting software, providing relevant personnel with all the information they need to help keep operations running smoothly. Best of all, GoFreight constantly provides free updates to ensure that clients can keep up with the ever-changing demands of the freight forwarding industry. Automating aspects of your freight forwarding business is the best way to ensure survival in the current market. With a powerful all-in-one tool designed by freight forwarders on the cutting edge of the industry, GoFreight can provide freight forwarders of any size with the perfect tools to help them stand out against their competition and rise to the challenges of the industry.

Increase your profitability like you never thought possible. Join over 1000+ companies whose profitability our freight management software has increased. Request a free demo now.