Summary
Fulfilment Australia, a Sydney-based high growth eCommerce 3PL was losing an unknown margin due to the lack of carrier bill auditing, manual pricing and billing. Dyspach was brought in to automate the customer onboarding, carrier invoice auditing and automating the end to end invoicing workflows in order to improve cashflow and stop margin leaks. The result was a 5-7.5% net margin recovery within the first 45 days of implementation, billing cycle cut from weeks to days, and eliminating of the need of 2-3 additional staff.
Challenges
Stale rates on cost plus pricing created revenue leaks, and billing using the WMS was not helping either. Onboarding was manual and billing queries from customers took a lot of digging to answer. The delays in billing caused backlog of invoices, leading to poor cashflow and limited visibility on the margin per account.
Alternatives
In order to keep things going, the finance, operations and customer service teams would collaborate each week to send the bills out based on manifested (lodged) dimensions and weights, and absorbed any carrier overcharges due to re-weighing.
Solution
Dyspach automated the entire workflow from modelling, pricing to billing. The transformation began by empowering the sales team to set up customers for billing directly in Dyspach, based on their sales agreements. Next came tackling the biggest source of margin leakage, auditing. We streamlined carrier invoice auditing by automating ingestion, cross-checking invoices against lodgement reports and cost rates, and flagging discrepancies in weight, size, and surcharges. Finally, we automated the production of reconciled invoices with accurate representation of dimensions, weight, and additional charges, ensuring these flowed back to the customers. The result: real-time visibility into margin per account and invoices instantly exportable in custom formats and into the accounting system, without any human intervention.
Implementation
We kicked-off with a fixed-scope pilot for 1 carrier to demonstrate the end-to-end workflow and the recovery of leaks in parallel to their current processes so they could compare. Once the pilot was confirmed to plug the margin leaks and we showed them where we could insert the automation, the finance team bought in to onboard the rest of their customers and 5 other carriers. Once the implementation was completed, there was additional training and hand-holding the finance team needed which was provided on priority and by 6 weeks, they were up and running.
Results
In 6 weeks, Fulfilment Australia was able to increase their net margin 5-7% by fixing the leaks in invoicing workflows involving just 1 carrier, after which we started adding more carriers into the mix. Once the full solution was deployed, the sales team could easily configure customers to bill, and the finance team didn't need more staff but also saved countless hours of manual work. This created a lot of problem solving capacity with key staff, which they started utilising for customer service and on margin-driving work.
What's next?
Once the invoicing automation was settled as a "business as usual" process, Fulfilment Australia engaged us to help them transition from cost plus into bespoke sell rate pricing which maximises the margin. If you are struggling with peace of mind around margin leaks and staff working on redundant activities, get in touch and we'd love to do a fixed-scope pilot with you to demonstrate the benefits first-hand.
Published on September 23, 2025 • Case Studies