Brady Trucking Implements One Day Invoice Turn-Around Time

Company Background

Headquarters: Vernal, Utah
Implementation Start: September 1, 2018
Fleet Size: 422

The Challenge

From its headquarters in rugged northeastern Utah, Brady Trucking has built a business by serving freight customers in remote areas near oil fields, fracking sites and beyond. Settling up the paperwork after delivery runs to far-flung destinations, however, hasn’t always been easy. Until last year, Brady mostly relied on sending hard copies of trip documents back to the home office, which could cause problems when drivers were several days away from the closest terminal.

“Most of our customers want stuff billed within three days, and we didn’t even get the paperwork within three days,” said Radell Andrews, who oversees Brady’s 10-person accounting team as accounts receivable supervisor. “We had to find a new way to do things.” Add in the cost of TripPaks and further processing delays after follow-up questions for drivers, and the result was a clear need for a faster, more reliable solution to speed up invoicing, driver payments and collections.

Solution

At first, Brady tried a third-party mobile app that promised to digitize load delivery forms but often resulted in unreadable images. The company was in the market for technology that drivers could quickly download and use without issue when Andrews saw a Vector demo at TMW’s in.sight User Conference. For Daniel Jorgensen, a Brady business analyst, the key was the Vector app’s capacity to identify different types of trip documents and transmit consistent data from the road—functionality that continued to improve when the fleet became the first to roll out Vector’s enhanced blur-detection technology.

“The image blurriness detection has been a great one for getting good quality images to invoice,” Jorgensen said, since some drivers still use older-model cell phones. “But also the ability for invoicers to reach out to the drivers and say, ‘Hey, I need a little more information here,’ or, ‘Hey, you forgot to fill out this field.’ It allows for a real time communication on billing issues that weren’t possible before.”

The result, Andrews said, is that the company can now invoice in as little as one day, and has plans to go totally paperless. The collections process has also improved with the ability to access archived documents at any time. “You have somebody call and say, ‘I don’t have a copy of this invoice,’” Andrews said. “I can just get the paperwork and send it right to them.”