Automate Warehouse and Transport Rate Cards to never miss a charge

The key to accurately capturing all service charges is rate card automation. Complex rate cards allow you to charge varying scales or additional ad hock rates for additional or premium services — allowing you to offer more, and provide increased customer service to your customers.

With CartonCloud you can eliminate manual data entry, with automated rate card calculations for even the most complex rate cards. It's that simple. 

Rate cards outline the billable services offered by warehouse and transport companies, providing scalable charging which can be used by (3PL) Third Party Logistics and Public Warehousing companies to accurately calculate charges for their clients. 

In CartonCloud, you can set up rate cards to suit your operations and services — and these can be as complex or simple as needed.

This may be:

• customer specific,
• for various services,
• storage length or conditions,
• premium handling,
• transport location,
• or any other charge relevant to your business. 

Charging by Clients

Public Warehouses and 3PL companies will generally have a range of clients, each with different inventory and requirements. Each customer can be listed, with their service requirements, along with varying pricing structures, to be automatically calculated in generating billing for that customer. 

Charging by Service

You may wish to offer the same rates to all customers, depending on the services they choose. These charges may relate to storage length or conditions, inventory handling changers for pick and pack, additional services like customer packaging, label printing, or delivery specifics.

Automating Rate Card Calculations

As you can imagine, this can get pretty complex and especially with a manual rating system, and it gets worse if you have a paper-based system or rely on an Excel spreadsheet to track services and charges. The calculations can get pretty detailed and tie up a lot of your administration resources, and often you will end up missing chargeable rates, resulting in revenue leak. 

You might have one client who is charged on a total weight basis of their goods in storage, and another who is charged on how many pallet spaces they occupy, with handling, pick/pack, and  additional services added on top depending on the order. Add on transport costs per weight or volume, for varying distances and zones, express delivery or regular — and you've got a pretty complex calculation for each and every order that is processed through your business.  

With CartonCloud, you can build these rate cards to automate all of these calculations and produce an invoice that covers all charges, inlcuding picking and packing, storage and handling, and any other ad hoc charges that apply. 

Designed to simplify complex logistics, and give small-medium logistics companies the tools to take on more business with ease; CartonCloud's Logistics Management Software for 3PLs automatically calculates the rates you have pre-loaded for each client and eliminates any manual work in producing the invoice. 

Having an automated rate calculation and invoicing feature is critical for any transport management system or warehouse management system.

5 ways To Simplify Your Warehouse & Transport Rate Card

1. Be Clear and Concise

Have your cards and rates clearly named and identified. This will eliminate confusion for operators entering data as to what charges they are allocating. You can set rate cards for a single customer, multiple customers or all of them, just ensure they are clearly labelled for easy identification. 

2. Consolidate similar items under a single rate

Consider consolidating similar charges under a single rate charge. This will reduce complexity and make inputting data easier and more accurate. Having many different charges with various names for what is essentially the same charge can cause confusion for both staff and customers alike. (Are you using CartonCloud already and want to know more about consolidating rates? Book a CartonCloud health check with our friendly service team to ensure you're getting the most from your system.)

3. Ditch your spreadsheet

Getting rid of the spreadsheet and other manual methods is one of the best ways to take charge of your rate cards. By keeping things simple and with secure back-up in the cloud, CartonCloud packs many powerful features to fine-tune your warehouse management.

4. Know your costs

Cost management is vital for an efficient warehouse management & transport management system. Understanding them and ensuring they are accounted for will improve profitability. Ensure that charges are clearly outlined in your terms and contracts and that they are clearly replicated in your invoices.

5. Invoice regularly

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. Reducing complexity with rate cards and ensuring the correct charges are allocated to each job with CartonCloud will allow you to issue invoices accurately as soon as the job is completed.

Why Choose CartonCloud?

CartonCloud's leading warehouse management  & transport management software is made for logistics people, by logistics people. 

With the development of CartonCloud, the aim was to build a warehouse management system with a transport management system integrated, whilst focusing on automating administration processes, accounting tasks to speed up cash-flow and create total transparency for customers while making it really easy-to-use.

To learn more about rate cards using CartonCloud visit our Knowledge Base article here