Day after day, for decades now, Pricing Managers and Billers have been burdened with manual, repetitive and tedious tasks.
- To create quotes, Pricing Managers need to manually map customer contracts to fuel price and calculate margins, taxes and freight.
- To create invoices, Billers need to cross check pricing and delivery data across numerous sources and have multiple back and forths between dispatchers, drivers, inventory managers and pricing managers.
All this for hundreds of orders in every shift.
Do they wish they didn’t have to waste such a big chunk of their day on these mundane tasks? 100%.
But do they have a choice? Nope.
Until now.
Presenting the Pricing and Customer Contracts module of FleetPanda!
No more:
- Wasting endless hours sifting through various sources to gather data, decipher it, and then draft quotes and invoices
- Human errors resulting in incorrect deliveries, suboptimal pricing, and billing disputes
- Manual tedious processes leading to delays in deliveries and invoice generation
FleetPanda automates and streamlines the entire pricing workflows starting from importing fuel prices to generating invoices.
Here’s a quick sneak peek into the module:
- It maps customer contracts to daily fuel prices to send quotes,
- auto-applies it to orders and
- syncs with back-office systems to generate instant invoices.
How will this help you?
For the Pricing Manager:
Current Process:
Let’s imagine a wholesale business with 30 trucks doing 6 deliveries per shift which equals 180 orders. Pricing Managers have to first pull in fuel price information from various sources (DTN, OPIS, emails from independent suppliers and terminals, etc) and assemble it in one place. For each order they have to pull the customer contract, map it to the day’s price in a way that maximises profit and then prepare quotes by calculating the agreed upon margins, taxes, fees, freight etc for that customer.
The Problems:
- Time-Consuming: To do all this accurately for one order it takes an average of 6 minutes. So that’s 12 hours for 180 orders. All this needs to be done before the dispatcher can even start their day. Which means you’ll need at least 3 pricing managers to handle the volume of orders. Such manual processes rob you of valuable hours better spent on strategic tasks such as procurement.
- Risk of Errors: Since there are a lot of figures and contract specifications to keep in mind and calculate manually- the chances of errors resulting in revenue leak is extremely high. For example, when creating a quote for an OPIS-high customer ordering 6000 gallons, they put the OPIS-mid price instead – the margins for that order just got slashed. Or they applied a 50 cent margin instead of 15, which is bound to make the customer mad.
- Lack of Centralization: Orders are on paper sheets, prices are available on different websites and your inbox, and customer contracts are on excel sheets / documents. Such fragmentation of information, makes tracking and updating pricing, extremely challenging.
FleetPanda’s Answer:
- Automated Workflows: Each pricing manager can save around 3 hours daily with the below automated pricing workflows.
- Directly import fuel rates from various sources through a CSV.
- Customer contracts once created, can be auto-mapped to everyday fuel rates and are applied while creating a delivery order. Pricing Managers can specify the top 3 terminals and loading racks for each order for the dispatcher/driver to choose from.
- Quotes can also be automatically generated – Fleetpanda calculates and adds in details like taxes, margins, freight fees, etc.
- Centralized Platform: Manage pricing, dispatch, delivery, and customer data seamlessly in one platform. No more duct-taping 5 tools that don’t play well together. This also means that Dispatchers, Inside Sales, Inventory Managers – everyone can get the pricing, dispatch and delivery information in one place with just a couple clicks.
For the Biller:
Current Process:
The biller gets the BOL from the driver, once fuel is delivered and shift is over. Biller has to match use the BOL to link load, delivery, and customer quote manually to generate an invoice. To create an invoice they need to get various data points such as fees, card in and card out time, supplier, the price for that day as per their contract etc and key in all these details manually into their back-office systems. All of this data is in different systems or (even in the heads of multiple people) and they’ll have to rummage through contracts, dispatch sheet, pricing sheets, driver notes, etc to generate an invoice.
The Problem:
- Delayed invoices resulting in strained cash flow: To do all of the above, is a monotonous and time consuming process. On average, creating an invoice takes 7 minutes. Two shifts with even 150 orders each will mean 300 invoices that need to be processed everyday. This means 35 hours / 8 hour work day = 4 billers. Or you can send back-dated invoices which strangles cash flow, stifles business growth and forces you to take loans.
I sell product worth millions every day and if I don’t go from delivery to cash on the same day, I lose millions in cash flow every day. – Carl Kleimann, Owner Moffitt Services.
2. Potential for Errors: The one part of the business where you can’t afford to make mistakes is in Billing. Mistakes cost you customer trust, credibility and money. But when you’re handling thousands of numbers with decimals, you’re prone to mistakes. It’s simply unavoidable. One decimal error for even one order (of say 4000 gallons) will cost you hundreds of dollars. Imagine 5 errors in a month. Its thousands of dollars down the drain that could’ve been easily avoided.
FleetPanda’s Resolution:
- Instant/Same-day Invoicing: With automatic BOL linking, as soon as the delivery is done, the load and delivery orders are auto-linked and sent to the back-office.The pricing which was auto-applied to the order also gets pushed to your accounting systems.
This enables you to do instant or same day invoicing and cuts the time required to create a invoice, by half. - Enhanced Accuracy: With pricing and BOL information automatically synced to the back-office, the potential for human errors goes down significantly which ensures great customer experience.
What are the key features in this module?
- CSV Import: Import pricing details from various sources seamlessly with just two clicks. In the near future, we also plan to integrate with DTN, OPIS to bring the feed directly inside FleetPanda without you having to do anything!
- Customer Contract Management: One-time entry of customer contracts, fees, margins, taxes reduces redundancy and errors.
3. Order Management: The pricing details including the taxes, margins, freight etc will be auto-calculated and applied to the delivery orders.
4. BOL Linking: When a driver loads, delivers and then completes an order, the load and delivery orders are auto linked. Dispatch can then verify it. This shrinks the time required for reconciliation by around 3 hours per user.
5. Auto-sync to Back-office: The pricing and BOL data is automatically sent to the back-office system. They just need to verify and invoice. This saves them a lot of time and ensures there are no errors.
Conclusion
When you’re selling a commodity item like fuel, there are only two growth levers you can use to your competitive advantage – pricing and speed of delivery. With FleetPanda, you gain a significant edge in both these key pillars of your business. The pricing module alone
- saves hundreds of hours per month for your pricing and billing teams,
- eliminates human errors
- thus saving you money
- and ensuring you provide the right amount of fuel, at the right time and bill them the right price every time
- while also ensuring maximum margins for your business.
Contact us now for more details or call us on (607) 523-4103. Or you can always email us at sales@fleetpanda.com.
