We don’t just finance your bills. We also make sure they get paid, and more importantly, can help you avoid moving risky loads in the first place. Our goal is to constantly work with you to help you build a customer list with a strong credit profile.
Credit Information
As a freight carrier, one of the biggest uncertainties you’ll face is whether you’ll be paid (and how quickly) for a load you haul for a new broker. Our carriers don’t have this problem, though; all carriers who factor with TFG can access to our entire body of broker credit information, and use our experience to help make better credit decisions.
Our carriers are able to log in to our website to look up a new customer or broker. Past credit experience can help you determine if the customer is likely to pay its bills on time. The TFG online portal tells you how long we have worked with the customer, what is presently open for this account, how quickly they have paid their bills in the past, and whether the account is on our “Non-Purchase” list. Our carriers appreciate having this valuable credit information available to them, and you will too.
In addition, if you run across a broker not in our system, Transportation Funding Group subscribes to outside credit reporting agencies. If you cannot find information about the broker or customer online, contact us. We’ll be able to pull a credit report to determine if the customer is creditworthy. And when you sign on with a new broker or customer, TFG will work with you to establish reasonable credit guidelines when you work with a new broker or customer.
Collections
We’ve been providing collection services to our carriers for as long as we’ve been in business. There aren’t too many collections issues we haven’t seen before, and we’re pretty good at handling even the most difficult collections jobs. You can’t get blood from a rock, but that doesn’t mean our collections department won’t try.
On a weekly (or more frequent) basis, we contact any customer with an invoice past 35 days. We work with them to secure payment dates, to resolve any paperwork or deduction issues, and to make sure payment is processed smoothly. And if for some reason it doesn’t go smoothly, we’ll come up with a way to press the issue, including anything from filing insurance or bond claim paperwork to working with our legal department to explore alternative options to collect payment.
Recourse
If a bill ultimately becomes uncollectable, TFG will sell the bill back to you. Typical reasons a bill becomes uncollectable include: damage offsets to a load, the broker goes out of business, or an invoice gets past 60 or 70 days old. Charging back bills is a last resort, though; we don’t like doing it, and we’ll work with you and your customers to avoid it whenever possible. If we do have to charge a bill back, we’ll typically offset that deduction against your next schedule of new bills.
