Every forwarder issues invoices. Almost none issues them on the day of delivery. In between sit three things: the daily list from the TMS, a price matrix per customer, and the consignee's advice note. And one person who merges them in Excel three times a week. The invoice then goes out on Tuesday for work done the Thursday before. The money arrives accordingly later.
I describe here a billing service we built for a forwarder. It creates the invoice as a PDF per customer and plant from daily list, price matrix and advice note, on the same day. What it does, what it costs, and where it does not fit.
Billing sits at the end of the chain and gets the leftovers of everyone's time. Dispatch delivers the daily list when the tours are done. Prices sit in a matrix per customer, by zone, weight and surcharge. The consignee's advice note confirms what actually arrived. Someone lays the three side by side, trims the list to billable lines and builds the invoice. At 60 lines a day that is two to three hours, and billing does not have them every day.
Then there is a deadline. From 1 January 2027, companies in Germany with more than 800,000 euros of prior-year turnover must issue e-invoices in B2B business. From 2028 it applies to all. (Growth Opportunities Act, Federal Ministry of Finance letter of 15 October 2024.) An invoice assembled in Excel is not structured. Whoever automates billing now builds it for XRechnung and ZUGFeRD from the start.
Step 1: read the daily list. The service takes the daily list from the TMS export, one line per shipment with customer, plant, weight and zone. It checks that all mandatory fields are filled. Lines without weight or plant go to the review list, not into the invoice.
Step 2: check against the advice note. For each shipment it looks for the consignee's advice note, usually a PDF per plant and day. If quantity and consignee match, the line is billable. If the note is missing or the quantity differs, the line stays behind with its reason attached.
Step 3: the price from the matrix. The price matrix is a table per customer with zones, weight classes and surcharges. The service reads it as a rule set, not as a spreadsheet. That means every pricing rule is tested. When the customer sends new prices, the table is swapped and the test runs again. (One customer's matrix had dozens of special rules, and some contradicted each other. Nobody had noticed, because the matrix had never been read as a whole.)
Step 4: the invoice per customer and plant. The service groups the billable lines. Per customer and plant it creates a PDF with a line list and a totals block. Lines that come from the advice note are marked, so the customer sees what the invoice rests on. The file goes to the archive and, if the customer wants, out by mail.
Step 5: protocol. Every run writes: lines read, billed, held for review, PDFs created, total. If a working day produces no invoice although a daily list existed, that is an outage and gets reported.
The first run for this customer had 34 shipments and finished in minutes. Build time until then: three weeks, one of them for the price matrix.
Honest math: the build costs three to four weeks of work. Operations cost a few hours a month for price changes and review cases. Against that stand two to three hours of billing a day and the days the money arrives earlier.
At 60 lines a day it pays back within the first quarter. At 10 lines a day it does not; a good template in the TMS is enough there. In our experience the line sits around 30 billable lines per working day, or more than three price matrices. Below that I would advise against it, and I have.
A caveat: the numbers come from one groupage forwarder with regular customers and price matrices. In charter traffic with individual prices per order, step 3 disappears. The service is then an advice-note reconciliation.
It does not post to the general ledger. The invoice reaches accounting the existing way, as a file or through the accounting system's interface. It does not replace a tax advisor, and whether a service is classified correctly for VAT is still checked by a person. It does what someone used to do in Excel, every day, with a protocol.
How many billable lines do you have per working day, and how many price matrices? Send me the two numbers and one anonymized daily list. I will show you the invoice the service builds from it, and the protocol. Ask for a process check: 30 minutes, no sales pitch.
