Finance & Reconciliation

Freight finance: when the books drift, the system should say so first

Freight accounting fails quietly — a wallet debited twice, an invoice whose payments no longer sum, a vendor overcharge nobody caught. By quarter-end reconciliation, the trail is cold.

Two ledgers, kept apart

// prepaid balance and receivables are different things — merge them and they never separate again

One shipment

Both legs below hang off this one object — not two ledgers kept side by side

AR · receivable

Invoice

issued only after delivery and actual cost entry

Payment applied

wallet and receipts applied FIFO

Overdue alerts

aged buckets; new orders gated past the limit

AP · payable

Actual cost

from the carrier bill — not the rate quoted at booking

Variance check

flagged automatically; small ones auto-close

Pass through when justified

a reason is required; the issued invoice is not quietly edited

Did this shipment actually make money

Both legs land on the same order, so margin is computed — not estimated

// When the books drift, the system says so: a set of invariants runs at the database layer (payments must equal applied amounts, balances cannot go negative…). You hear about it then — not at month end.

Wallet is the default — no credit application, no credit review, and it's what most customers use start to finish. Top up, wait for the funds to clear, then ship against the balance. Credit is something you apply for separately as volume grows, reviewed and capped before it's granted. Both settle through the same invoice and reconciliation logic underneath.

Wallet — prepaid balance

Customer prepaid funds, never allowed below zero. Placing an order only holds an authorization; the actual debit happens on delivery and invoicing, applied FIFO.

Invoices — the only source of AR

Receivables derive solely from open invoices. A spending limit is granted only after review — it is not available by default. It authorizes shipping; it is not a posting, and never inflates what is owed.

A set of invariants, checked hourly

// not a reporting convention — a database-level constraint

Identities

Paid amount must equal the sum of its payment allocations; balance must equal total minus paid minus credits. Hand-edited figures surface immediately.

Boundaries

Wallet never negative; available-to-ship equals wallet plus limit minus open invoices minus holds. Crossing the line raises an alert.

Reversibility

Every allocation is reversible, and refunds must attach to a real payment source — no credits conjured from nothing.

These run hourly and push anomalies straight to the ops channel. They are tuned to over-report rather than miss: the later an accounting fault surfaces, the steeper the cost of tracing it.

AR, AP and the outside ledger

Receivables

Aging buckets, per-customer rollups and line-level detail — with a single invoicing chokepoint, so no revenue bypasses it.

Payables

This is the day-to-day core of our freight reconciliation system: carrier bills grouped by vendor with automatic variance matching. A carrier undercharge never touches an already-confirmed customer invoice — the difference is margin; an overcharge can only reach the customer's bill with a documented reason attached — never an unexplained line item. For a 3PL or freight broker, this is the same carrier-bill-matching work that 3PL freight reconciliation normally means — it just runs automatically here instead of being audited line by line by hand.