A profitable carrier can still run out of money. Fuel and drivers are paid weekly; brokers pay in thirty days or more. Growth makes it worse, because more loads mean more fuel now against more receivables later.
What you control
The gap between delivery and invoicing
A signed POD sitting in a cab for four days is four days of financing you are providing free. This is entirely within your control and costs nothing to fix.
Completeness of the package
A missing lumper receipt holds an invoice as effectively as a dispute does. Capturing documents at the moment they exist — at the dock, at the fuel island — rather than reconstructing them later is the whole discipline.
Which brokers you run for
Track days to pay by broker and the list usually reorders. A broker paying $2.60 at sixty days can be worse for a small carrier than one paying $2.45 at fifteen. Rate is visible; payment behaviour is not, unless you record it.
When factoring is worth it
Factoring buys cash flow at a real cost. A fee that looks small against an invoice is large against the margin on that load — which is the comparison to make, and the one you cannot make without load-level margin data.
The same applies to broker quick pay. A few percent off the top for payment in days rather than weeks is either sensible or expensive depending on a number most carriers do not have.
The order to work in
- 01Close the delivery-to-invoice gap. It is free.
- 02Make packages complete at source. It is nearly free.
- 03Rank brokers by realised margin and days to pay, and shift volume accordingly.
- 04Then decide whether you still need to buy cash flow, and at what price.