Road freight
One trip, up to four parties, every document ready for finance review
For High Way, a road-freight operator, we built a separate settlement step for each party to a truck trip, so the trip's billable charges become the right customer invoice, subcontractor bill, driver settlement or toll bill, each prepared as a draft for finance to approve.
The Business Problem
In road freight, a truck trip is not one financial transaction. One trip can create obligations to up to four parties: the shipper, an outside truck owner, the company driver and the roads authority for tolls.
Each party is owed something different. The shipper is invoiced for the freight and its billable charges. An outside truck owner, when one is used, is owed a subcontractor bill. The company driver's trip money has to be settled. Tolls are owed to the roads authority. All four start from the same trip, but each needs its own document, its own counterparty and its own figures.
When this is handled by hand, finance re-keys the same trip several times, and the obvious risks follow: a party billed twice, a party missed, or costs that cannot be traced back to the customer they served. Standard fleet apps track vehicles, not the commercial settlement of a trip. This is logic a standard ERP set-up cannot express without engineering.
Standard fleet apps track vehicles, not the commercial settlement of a trip.
Our Approach
We modelled the settlement on how the operator bills a trip: who is owed what, from which recorded charges, and who must approve before money moves. We then built a settlement step for each party into the trip record itself, so the operational record and the financial documents come from the same source.
Two principles shaped the design. First, the trip is the single place where charges are recorded; every document is derived from it, not typed again. Second, finance keeps the final say. The system prepares documents; people approve them.
Delivered Solution
A dedicated settlement step for each party. Each step turns the trip's billable charges into the right document: a customer invoice, a subcontractor bill, a driver settlement or a toll bill.
Drafts as a built-in financial control. Every document is created as a draft for finance to review before anything is posted. The system does the assembly work, and an accountable person checks and posts the result, which keeps the review step that finance teams rely on.
No double billing. The system will not bill the same trip twice to the same party, so a trip already invoiced to its shipper, or already billed for its driver, cannot be billed to that party again by mistake.
Customer-level profitability. Revenue, subcontractor and driver lines are tagged automatically to the customer they relate to, so customer profitability before toll costs is visible without manual allocation.
Traceability from document to trip. From any generated document, finance can open the trips behind it, and each trip shows which parties have been billed. A question about an invoice or a bill can be answered from the document itself.
Running balances. All-time and month-to-date running balances are calculated by the database in a single query, rather than line by line.
Evidence-Backed Value
What we built is live in High Way's system and leaves finance in control: a draft document for each of up to four parties, each built from the trip record by its own settlement step and left for finance to approve before anything is posted; a block on billing the same trip twice to the same party; and customer-level profitability before toll costs, with a trail from every document back to its trips.
a High Way trip can need up to four documents, each drafted by its own settlement step; preparing two to four by hand, at five minutes each, would take finance 10 to 20 minutes per trip.
Expected benefit: designed to reduce re-keying and double billing, with finance approving every document.
What This Means for Your Organization
The same shape appears wherever one operational event creates obligations to several parties: an agency booking that involves a client, a supplier and a commission; a subcontracted job billed to the customer and paid to the subcontractor; a fee collected on behalf of a third party and passed through. Where your operation works this way, the question is not whether your ERP can raise an invoice, but whether it can settle the whole event correctly, with finance in control. That is the logic we engineer.
Bring one process that frustrates your teams.
In a first working conversation, we will walk through:
- where it waits unseen
- where its numbers are re-keyed
- which of its rules live only in people’s heads