Picturing faster cash
48 Commercial Carrier Journal November 2008 M onths before the recent mortgage meltdown hit Wall Street, the trucking industry already was facing a credit crunch of its own when fuel prices surged to new records. Carriers essentially provide shippers with interest-free loans the moment a truck is dispatched and fueled. Before deregulation when every-thing had to be done with paper, postage and, usually, typewrit-ers the Interstate Commerce Commission required shippers to pay freight bills within seven days. But now carriers pay for fuel in cash typically by the next day and often consider themselves lucky to receive payment for freight and fuel surcharges 45 days after delivering loads. Carriers may not be able to control how long shippers take to pay their freight bills, but they can control how quickly custom-ers get them. Because most ship-pers require proof-of-delivery documents prior to paying invoices, scanning and imaging systems can help process billing documents faster. When document imaging sys-tems emerged in the early 1990s, the cost of hardware scanners and data storage together with soft-ware licensing put the technology beyond the reach of most carriers. Hardware costs have fallen pre-cipitously since then. In-house soft-ware remains a big investment, but many vendors now offer Web-based software systems that sidestep the cost of software licenses. Combined with remote scanning and other outsourcing services, most docu-ment imaging systems and services are scalable to any fleet. While document scanning isn't new, vendors have developed new ways to automate and speed the By Aaron Huff