Tag Archives: Truck Factoring

How To Find Good Freight Brokers

It’s a problem that many small or mid-sized trucking companies run into constantly. How can you find good freight brokers — ones that will pay a good rate, and pay on time? Every dispatcher knows the feeling: Scanning the load board and seeing a list of only unfamiliar or questionable brokers. And yet sometimes you have no choice. Your driver needs to get home, and he or she is in an area where there simply aren’t many options. So you take a load that you aren’t sure about.

There are many things you can do to find out about freight brokers. The load board might have some information about how the broker pays its bills. Or you might be able to piece together some authority or bond information about freight brokers FMCSA Licensing information. You might even ask around to see what other truckers say about a company. But load boards aren’t always able to put together complete information, and the FMCSA won’t tell you you days to pay. Asking around won’t always give you a reliable picture.

Transportation Funding Group Can Help

If you’ve looked around our website, you know we’re a factoring company. And you’ve seen that we can help you speed up your cash flow like we have hundreds of trucking companies over the years. But that isn’t all we do. Our goal is to do whatever we can to help our carriers be financially healthy. So we also try to provide useful credit information about freight brokers and shippers before a carrier moves a load.

Transportation Funding Group has more than 20 years’ experience with freight brokers large, medium, and small, and we can tell you what our carriers’ experience with a particular broker has been. And since new freight brokerages appear all the time, we’ve got the resources and research to investigate companies that we haven’t worked with before, and tell you whether it makes sense to accept a load or not. And if a carrier of ours moves a load for an otherwise good freight broker, but we’re still having problems collecting, we’ll do whatever it takes to get paid, and if that means putting together a bond filing against a freight broker, we can do that too.

So even if you aren’t sure whether you need cash flow help, give us a call. Though we are a factoring company, we’ll also help you with more than just improving cash flow.

The Advantages of Billing Services

Everyone knows that time is a precious commodity. You juggle your time, do your work and juggle your responsibilities, hoping that there will be enough time to get everything done. For many trucking companies, one of the things that sucks up lots of time each week is invoice and bill preparation. Many small trucking companies find that they would take advantage of an outside billing service if it’s reliable and priced right. In response to this need, Transportation Funding Group has developed a low-cost billing service.

Transportation Funding Group recently completed the development of a QuickBooks-based billing system that we use to help our carriers generate and process billing. It’s simple: just submit your paperwork to TFG and we’ll assemble the paperwork and produce a professional-looking invoice. Your billing is then processed on the factoring side immediately, so that you have access to your cash flow as soon as possible, instead of later, once you’ve found time to do your weekly billing.

With this billing service, you get back the time that you have been spending on bill preparation. You can devote yourself to your other responsibilities — dispatch, customer relations, actually driving — instead of grinding through your billing each week. Just send us your trip tickets and supporting documents, and we’ll take care of the rest.

We charge on a per-invoice basis, and our rates are low. There is no long-term contract and you get complete flexibility. Call TFG at 1-800-705-3863 to learn more.

The Truck Driver Shortage for Small Truckers

There’s a truck driver shortage in the trucking industry, but it may not be a bad thing for small trucking companies.

It’s been a problem that’s received significant press over the last couple of years: even as general unemployment remains a problem for the economy as a whole, the Wall Street Journal reports that the trucking industry continues to experience a driver shortage. At the time of this post, there were an estimated 25,000 unfilled trucking jobs in America, and, according to a report from the American Transportation Association, that shortfall could increase tenfold over the next decade.

There are a couple of possible reasons for the shortage. The WSJ article mentioned above suggests that it’s possible that younger drivers simply don’t like the idea of life on the road. It’s also possible that the federal regulations enacted in 2013 have played a role; since the new driving-time rules took effect, drivers are forced to stay on the road longer, but at the same pay rates. Another commenter suggested that a construction boom is contributing to the driver supply problems: individuals who would otherwise drive trucks have changed industries, and are working work locally.

Regardless of the cause of the continuing shortage, what does this mean for trucking companies in the short- and medium-term? It makes sense that a weak labor supply will have upward pressure on prices – in other words, driver wages will generally increase as trucking companies compete to hire a smaller pool of drivers. This would help drivers, of course; but it may also help smaller trucking companies.

As wages go up, over time, the price of loads will rise – that’s an obvious benefit. And as larger truckers are constrained by a dwindling driver supply, they’ll be able to deliver fewer loads. Copeland Trucking, as reported in the WSJ article referenced above, have been “turning away business because of unfilled openings.” These loads still need to be moved, and it may mean that flexible smaller companies can fill the gaps created by larger companies’ inability to hire drivers, as more loads become available.

The driver shortage is real, and it may not be going anywhere. But it may, in the long run, be a good problem to have for small companies.