Rating & Charge Automation
Automate Accurate Rating and Charge Validation Across Your Logistics Network
Rating & Charge Automation is a core capability within Revenue Protect that enables logistics providers to calculate, validate, and manage charges consistently for customers.
By bringing together contracts, rate cards, shipment activity, operational data, and business rules, Revenue Protect helps organisations automate the rating process, reduce manual effort, improve billing accuracy, and minimise revenue leakage. Rating & Charge Automation provides a scalable foundation for billing and AR control.
Why Rating & Charge Automation Matters
Logistics providers often manage thousands of customer-specific pricing agreements, accessorial charges, fuel adjustments, service-level commitments and so on.
As transaction volumes increase, manually validating charges becomes increasingly difficult and can lead to:
- Incorrect invoice details and values
- Missed billable services
- Revenue leakage
- Customer disputes and dissatisfaction
- Delayed customer payment
- Delayed billing cycles
- Reduced confidence in margin performance
Rating & Charge Automation reduces these risks by applying commercial rules consistently across every shipment and transaction.
How Rating & Charge Automation Works
Revenue Protect combines shipment data, activity records, contractual agreements, and pricing logic to calculate the charges that should apply to a shipment.
When a user uploads a contractual agreements with a customer, for example a rate card, it is read by the 7bridges AI to create a rating engine.
When shipment data is supplied by API, AIDE workflow or configured feeds it is used to create a Unified Shipment Record. This in turn is used to calculate the Planned Charges for a shipment.
Planned Charges can then be used to:
- Prepare customer invoices
- Validate customer invoices prepared in other systems
- Create short term revenue forecasts and accruals
- Create profitability analyses by comparing Planned Charges to associated costs
This allows billing and finance teams to focus on exceptions and high value activities rather than manually reviewing every transaction.
Contract and Rate Card Management
Revenue Protect provides a structured framework for managing customer and supplier contracts and rate cards. These define the pricing and costing structures used to calculate transportation charges. These can be maintained as commercial agreements evolve, helping organisations ensure that current pricing is always available for operational and financial processes.
Contracts and rate cards can contain almost any commercial structure, often comprised of:
- Base transportation rates
- Lane-specific pricing
- Fuel surcharge logic
- Accessorial charges
- Minimum charge thresholds
- Service-levels
- Customer-specific commercial agreements
By centralising contract information, organisations can apply pricing consistently and reduce dependence on manual calculations.
Business Benefits
- Improved pricing consistency
- Reduced contract interpretation errors
- Faster onboarding of commercial agreements
- Greater confidence in billing accuracy
- Faster rate maintenance
- Improved commercial governance
Planned Charge Calculation
Revenue Protect can calculate expected charges based on customer data and their subcontractor data, which we call Planned Charges.
These Planned Charges become the financial benchmark against which actual charges can be validated.
Planned charge calculations help organisations understand:
- What should be billed to customers
- Expected shipment profitability
- Potential commercial exceptions
- Forecast/accrued revenue
Business Benefits
- Early identification of discrepancies
- Improved forecasting accuracy
- Faster invoice validation
- Better profitability visibility
Automated Charge Validation
Once actual invoice data becomes available, Revenue Protect can automatically compare actual charges with expected charges derived from contracts and rate cards.
Differences can be identified and categorised automatically, allowing teams to focus only on exceptions that require investigation.
Validation may include:
- Base transportation charges
- Fuel surcharges
- Handling fees
- Additional service charges
- Customs-related fees
- Accessorial services
- Customer-specific charge categories
Business Benefits
- Reduced manual invoice review
- Faster auditing processes
- Increased billing accuracy
- Improved operational efficiency
Supporting Revenue Assurance
Rating & Charge Automation provides the financial foundation for many of the other Revenue Protect capabilities.
The calculated and validated charge data supports:
- Comprehensive Audit
- Revenue Capture
- Contract & Rating Validation
- Dispute & Exception Management
- Margin Visibility
- Reporting & Analytics
By establishing a trusted source of pricing truth, organisations can make better commercial decisions and improve financial performance across the network.
Typical Use Cases
Freight Forwarders & Logistics Organizations
Validate customer and supplier charges across complex multi-leg shipments and international service networks.
Third-Party Logistics Providers (3PLs)
Automate customer billing calculations and identify supplier invoice discrepancies before payment.
Fourth-Party Logistics Providers (4PLs)
Manage large volumes of customer- and supplier-specific contracts while maintaining pricing consistency.
Parcel and Carrier Networks
Validate high-volume transactional billing and improve revenue assurance across surcharge-heavy operating environments.
Key Business Outcomes
Organisations using Rating & Charge Automation typically aim to achieve:
- Improved billing accuracy
- Reduced revenue leakage
- Increased charge validation coverage
- Faster invoice processing
- Reduced manual administration
- Lower dispute volumes
- Better financial control
- Greater margin protection
- Improved customer confidence
- Enhanced commercial governance
Summary
Rating & Charge Automation helps logistics organisations transform complex pricing, billing, and validation activities into a scalable, automated process.
By combining contracts, rate cards, shipment activity, and business rules within a single platform, Revenue Protect enables organisations to calculate expected charges, validate actual invoices, identify discrepancies, and improve financial control across their logistics network.
The result is more accurate billing, stronger revenue assurance, greater operational efficiency, and improved profitability visibility