Parcel Carriers: Breaking it Down
The two primary parcel carriers offer some innovative billing tools on their websites. And I'm speaking specifically about FedEx and UPS. I'll talk about them one at a time.
For FedEx, they offer a program available on their website that you need to sign up for. They call it FedEx Billing Online. They designed it to give you the ability to look and review all your invoices. This helps you understand exactly where all your transportation charges are going. Most importantly, it's giving you the due dates for when you need to pay them.
Paying Invoices Online
The services also offer you the ability to pay those invoices online. If you have the ability to pay by credit card, you can set that up, but ACH is always accepted. So one of the benefits of doing that is the ability to research specific invoices that you have. If you're currently on EDI billing, you have no ability to do that. If you're getting paper billing, it's very cumbersome to do that.
But if you have FedEx Billing Online, they do make it very easy. We actually prefer that our audit customers use FedEx Billing Online. It gives you visibility into what we're doing. Any credits that we find on your behalf are easy to find within the FedEx Billing Online system.
UPS offers something very similar to this. UPS calls its solution Billing Center. And what they like to do is the same thing. They give you the ability to look at all your invoices. But look at the way that they manage the credit process. You're actually able to see all the work that we do in the individual invoices themselves.
What Happens When We Find You a Credit
So for FedEx, it is a pre-audit. If we find you a credit, you can look on the FedEx Billing Online to see if that credit has shown up. When it has shown up and FedEx acknowledges it, it will be there on the website.
For UPS, going through Billing Center, it gives you the ability to look at the invoices. You see on the invoice any of the credits that we found you, say, last week or a couple of weeks ago. So if you're looking for a specific credit, you can always search for a particular tracking number. We tell you that we received a credit for a particular package. You can search on that tracking number. And you can find that credit of an invoice and which invoice it was applied to. Those are some of the benefits.
Differences Between Parcel Carriers
Let's say you want to sign up for FedEx Billing Online or UPS Billing Center. If you're currently getting paper billing, there is one key thing for you remember. This is how if you sign up for their online billing, the paper will stop. If you're with EDI, if you sign up on FedEx, you sign up for FedEx Billing Online, it will stop the EDI. For UPS, you can actually have EDI and UPS Billing Center at the same time. So there are a few differences.
So as you go through signing up for these things, we will walk you through it. Both sites will tell you whether you can still continue to get other billing methods once you sign up.