We recently conducted a case study for one of our harbor towage clients. We wanted to see how much revenue they were missing from a new charge that they introduced a couple of years ago. They had automated systems in place for most of their invoicing. However this new charge that was on some of their contracts required someone in billing to manually add the charge. The billing person had to recognise certain attributes on the job and know which customers she could add this charge for.
We looked at two different ports with one of the ports busier than the other and looked at two years’ worth of data. In the busy port for the first year, almost 22% of the potential revenue from this charge was missed, although in the second year it had come down to 12%. The less busy port missed 10% in the first year, but was able to trim the missed revenue to 1% in the second year. We are now going to automate this charge for them and this should reduce their missed billing to under 0.1%.
This is in line with other research that has shown up to 10% of revenue can be gained when automating billing processes.
Harbor towage companies that still rely on manual billing processes are leaving money on the table. With Helm CONNECT Jobs we’ve made it possible to automate the billing for almost any scenario your sales and marketing team can come up with.