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Logistics / Freight & Parcel Shipping

Multi-Carrier Shipping & Billing Automation Platform

A shipping platform that prices and books freight across carriers, then automates the billing behind it: customer invoicing, carrier invoice reconciliation, commissions, and dangerous goods compliance.

Role
Architecture, backend and frontend development, QA, accessibility testing, and DevOps
  • AWS
  • Serverless
  • Amazon Cognito
  • API Gateway
  • Amazon SES
  • QuickBooks
  • FedEx
  • UPS
  • Multi-carrier rating APIs

The challenge

What the business was running into

  • Revenue in multi-carrier shipping arrives as thousands of small shipments, each with its own rate, surcharges, and margin, which makes manual billing both slow and quietly inaccurate
  • Carrier invoices have to be reconciled against what was actually shipped and what the customer was charged, and discrepancies are only worth catching if they are caught early
  • Reseller and split-account arrangements mean commissions and revenue attribution cannot be derived from a simple shipment total
  • Regulated cargo, including dangerous goods, carries notification duties that cannot depend on somebody remembering

The approach

Multi-carrier shipping, across FedEx, UPS, and the other carriers an operation books with, looks like a rating and booking problem from the outside. The harder problem sits behind it, in the money. Every shipment carries a customer charge, a carrier cost, surcharges that appear after the fact, and in reseller arrangements a commission and a revenue split. Multiply that by thousands of shipments a month and manual billing stops being slow and starts being inaccurate in ways nobody can see.

This platform automates that layer. Customer billing runs as a queue-driven workflow that generates and delivers documents straight from the shipment record. Carrier invoices come in, get matched against what was actually shipped and what the customer was charged, and are tracked through payment, so a discrepancy is a line on a list rather than a margin loss discovered next quarter. Commissions recalculate against the shipments that earned them, revenue is attributed correctly across split accounts, and the resulting billing history flows into the accounting platform so finance and operations are reading the same numbers.

Around the money sit the things a shipping operation cannot get wrong. A configurable flagging engine identifies dangerous goods and raises the required notifications without depending on anyone spotting the cargo type. Administration is permission-based, with explicit guards so an admin cannot quietly grant themselves more access than they should have, and with invite handling designed to stay consistent even when one step in the sequence fails. Reporting gives leadership the comparisons they actually ask for, week over week through year over year, and separates billed from unbilled shipments so revenue does not sit unclaimed.

The platform runs on managed cloud services in a serverless architecture, so capacity follows shipment volume rather than a server estimate made a year ago. Delivery includes the parts that usually get cut: a continuous deployment pipeline for the reporting service, and accessibility testing on the interfaces staff use all day.

Key capabilities

What the system does

  1. Automated billing workflow

    Customer billing runs as a scheduled, queue-driven workflow rather than a monthly scramble, generating and delivering documents from the shipment record itself.

  2. Carrier invoice reconciliation

    Carrier invoices are received, matched against shipments and customer charges, and tracked through payment, so discrepancies surface while they can still be disputed.

  3. Commission and revenue attribution

    Commissions recalculate against the shipments that earned them, and revenue is attributed correctly across reseller and split-account structures rather than being estimated.

  4. Accounting sync

    Billing history flows into the accounting platform, so finance works from the same numbers as operations instead of importing spreadsheets.

  5. Dangerous goods flagging

    A configurable flagging engine identifies regulated cargo and raises the required notifications automatically, keeping a compliance duty out of human memory.

  6. Reporting with real comparisons

    Billing dashboards that compare week over week, month over month, quarter over quarter, and year over year, and separate billed from unbilled shipments so nothing sits unclaimed.

  7. Role-based administration

    Granular permissions with explicit guards against privilege escalation, plus an invite flow built to stay consistent even when a step fails midway.

  8. Built on managed cloud services

    A serverless architecture using managed authentication, API, email, and queue services, so capacity follows shipment volume without servers to nurse.

Outcome

Billing that used to be assembled by hand now runs as an automated workflow, with carrier invoices reconciled against shipments and every figure traceable back to the shipment that produced it.

Results

What changed for the business

  • Billing became a process, not an event

    The month-end assembly of invoices was replaced by a workflow that runs continuously against the shipment record.

  • Discrepancies caught while they matter

    Reconciling carrier invoices against shipments and customer charges turns silent margin leakage into a list somebody can act on.

  • Compliance handled by the system

    Dangerous goods notifications are raised by the platform rather than depending on an individual noticing the cargo type.

  • Reporting leadership actually uses

    Period comparisons and billed versus unbilled views give management the questions they ask most, answered from live data.

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