Freight audit and payment is reaching a turning point. What was once primarily a back-office function focused on processing and validating invoices is evolving into Transportation Financial Intelligence: the ability to understand transportation costs, validate their accuracy, and use that information to make better decisions with greater speed and confidence.
Moving Beyond Invoice Processing
Transportation organizations manage millions of dollars in freight spend every year. In the process, they generate an enormous amount of information about providers, rates, shipping lanes, surcharges, delivery performance, and other costs. Yet many continue to evaluate freight audit and payment primarily by transaction cost or invoice processing speed.
“Every invoice that passes through a freight audit and payment system provides another piece of information about what is happening across a company’s transportation network. When that information is collected, organized, and analyzed over time, it can reveal patterns, cost increases, performance problems, and other changes that are difficult to recognize by looking at individual transactions,” says Luther Brown of nVision Global, company that works with global shippers to improve transportation financial performance by combining freight audit and payment with greater visibility into transportation costs, data, and business intelligence.
“The real question is how companies can move beyond efficiently processing and paying freight invoices to extract greater value from the information those transactions provide,” adds Brown.
Although every organization captures enormous amounts of transportation data, the information is often fragmented, inconsistent, or incomplete. At nVision Global, much of this is managed by nSure AI, a freight-data intelligence engine that captures and validates transportation data and then turns it into financial insights.
“Simply having access to more data provides limited value,” explains Brown. “The information must first undergo governance to ensure consistency, quality, completeness, and financial integrity before it can be used effectively.”
Brown believes this is the role companies such as nVision Global will increasingly play: helping organizations turn fragmented transportation information into organized, governed, decision-ready intelligence that organizations can confidently use to improve financial performance, operational execution, and strategic decision-making.
The approach will combine governance, experienced transportation professionals, standardized global processes, advanced technology, automation, and global operational execution to support complex, multi-modal, multi-region transportation environments.
“Over the past several years, technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, OCR, APIs, automation, and system integration have changed how freight audit and payment work is performed,” says Brown.
“Those advancements are important, but they are only part of the story,” says Brown, adding that he believes the industry is entering its most significant evolution in more than a decade.