The Early Estimate

From Waiting on the Bill to Knowing Ahead of Time

A shipment's true cost used to arrive on its own schedule — the carrier's — not the finance team's. Until the invoice landed, cost was a placeholder.

As a regional distributor of electrical and industrial supplies, the company shipped constantly to contractors, job sites, and branch locations, and a meaningful share of that volume moved as drop shipments — packages sent by a vendor or supplier on the distributor's behalf, but moving under the distributor's own carrier accounts. Because those charges weren't billed until the carrier's normal invoice cycle caught up, finance had no reliable way to know transportation cost exposure until well after the shipment had already moved. Month-end accrual meant estimating freight spend that hadn't been formally billed yet, with no real data to estimate it from.

Closing the Loop When the Real Invoice Lands

An early estimate is only useful if it eventually meets the real number. The distributor needed both halves — the estimate up front, and a dependable actual to reconcile it against.

Rating in Transit gave finance and billing teams a prospective charge as soon as a shipment moved, ahead of the carrier's official invoice, letting them accrue freight cost against the correct internal cost center at month-end instead of waiting on the bill. Carrier Invoice Import brought each carrier's actual billing data into Intelligent Logistics on a timely, consistent basis once it was finally issued, giving the team a single, centralized source to reconcile the earlier estimate against — rather than tracking invoices separately across carrier portals.

For a distributor managing freight cost across its own network and a steady stream of vendor drop shipments, that pairing turned freight accrual from a number finance hoped was close enough into one built on an actual estimate, checked against the real bill as soon as it arrived.