Any good CFO or accountant will tell you that the key to surviving an economic downtown is maintaining cash flow.

According to Gartner, the #1 issue facing manufacturers and wholesalers is maximising cash flow. This is of course also relevant for domestic carriers and logistics companies. Your company needs to free cash to make strategic investments in new products, new markets, service debt, and acquisitions.

Cash flow issues are almost always caused by:

- Poor cash flow forecasting
- Inefficient accounting & debt collection practices
- Disputes about the facts

Whilst there is no silver bullet for these causes, eCargo can offer solutions to dramatically reduce the impact of these issues on your company's cash flow.

With some businesses experiencing a larger freight bill than labour bill, the forecasting of freight costs has become a very important factor of a businesses overall cash flow forecast.

Using eCargo, a business can examine detailed freight cost and movement reports for previous periods, as well as providing reports on current and accrued freight costs. This allows forecasts to be updated regularly, based on real time freight data.

Disputes over freight costs hit carriers and logistics providers particularly hard. A single invoice line (or delivery) in dispute can hold up an entire freight invoice, causing immediate cash flow issues for the freight provider. eCargo delivers solutions to this problem by:

- Providing a central store of freight data that is visible to all supply chain partners. This immediately reduces the number of disputes as all parties are looking at the same information.

- Enabling freight carriers to 'pre-check' invoice lines against the cost calculated in eCargo, which in turns allows them to separate out potential disputes into 'exception' invoices. This prevents the scenario of a disputed delivery holding up payment of an invoice where 99% of invoice lines are not in dispute.

- Providing a standard process for rating, reconciling and approving freight invoices that is visible to all parties.

Through providing a simple and clear process for managing freight movements and payments, we have clearly seen customer's invoice values in dispute drop from millions of dollars to thousands of dollars.