Rate & Pay - A Freight Payment Panacea?

Rate & Pay is a generic term for customer "self-invoicing": of freight charges. Traditionally, carriers generated a freight bill (invoice) for transportation related charges, and the customer reviewed and paid it. With Rate & Pay the customer tells the carrier what will be paid and remits payment based on an electronic bill of lading.

Rate & Pay can work well if the shipments are outbound, pervade or standardized regular movements, but can present problems if inbound collect or third party billing. Rate & Pay minimizes the traditional paper trail and relies heavily on an electronic database, which we know is only as accurate as the input and as complete as the program that controls it. With Rate & Pay it is more difficult to reconstruct and document what was done. Useful? Undoubtedly. A Panacea? Probably not in most cases.