Best Freight Forwarding Software for Businesses in 2023

Overview of Freight Forwarding Software Solutions

Freight forwarding is coordinating the shipment of goods from one place to another by a single or multiple carriers. With disruptive technologies and COVID-19, the traditional freight forwarding industry has been heavily hit over the past few years.

Many companies are adopting logistics and freight forwarding software to avoid perishing and manage their entire freight forwarding process effortlessly and effectively.

A cloud-based freight forwarding solution controls and manages air freight, ocean freight, land freight, warehouses, transport, and customs. It also integrates seamlessly with billing solutions, CRM, and financial accounting from anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

Freight forwarders act as mediators between shippers and transportation services by negotiating prices and choosing the most reliable, economical, and fastest routes between clients and carriers.

Who Uses Freight Forwarding Software?

The best transportation software is ideal for freight forwarders, NVOCCs, consolidators, logistics companies, export/import firms, and more. It offers complete solutions for automating logistics operations. In addition, freight forwarding software solutions provide outstanding customer service.

Moreover, the freight forwarding solution is a popular choice across the worldwide supply chain industry for freight service providers.

This well-designed software creates documents such as commercial invoices and offers online tracking, database management, and storage fees to facilitate freight release locally and internationally.

With the help of freight forwarder software, all freight forwarding tasks can be performed, including warehouse, shipping, and accounting transactions.

The digital freight forwarder software with warehouse management system is multi-currency compatible and works with multiple currencies.

What are the Common Features of Best Freight Forwarding Software?

Below are the features of the best freight forwarding ERP software:

Invoicing

Manage your shipping, land, and air freight by creating documents detailing what you owe to your shipping partners, agents, customs, and others. It also handles multi-currency payments within the primary accounting software.

Quotations

You can generate and send quotes for all modes of transportation. You can track the status of sections and convert them into orders whenever needed. You can include one-click shipments, templates, and shipping rate calculations.

Order Management

The best freight forwarding software helps capture, track, and fulfill multiple sales channels. Managing invoices, recurring orders, integrating with shipping carriers, clone orders, detecting errors, managing backorders, returns, and reconciling purchase orders.

Air/Ocean/Land Shipment Management

Organize consolidations and direct shipments towards inbound or outbound destinations, generating all necessary documentation such as waybills, cargo manifests, booking confirmations, TSA letters, loading plans, etc.

CRM

CRM system provides an integrated view of your prospects and customers so that you can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing, sales, and customer service operations.

It includes email tools, phone call notes, and user behavior tracking to score leads and determine which prospects are ready to purchase.

Supply Chain Planning

By coordinating data from separate business units, you can anticipate customer demand and plan resources or production accordingly.

You can procure what is needed using your sales representatives' historical data on order volumes, inventory turns, and forecasts. As a result, you won't have to store too much raw material or finished product.

Warehouse Management

Warehouse management ensures coordination of inventory and actions in warehouses or distribution centers, optimization of picking and shipping, and ensuring that orders are fulfilled accurately.

The freight forwarding management system also provides faster delivery times and efficient labor management, the status of an order is more visible, storage space is optimized, inventory movement is minimized, and yard and dock productivity is enhanced.

What are the Benefits of Freight Forwarding Solution?

For a unified effort between procurement, inventory management, dealing with vendors, shipping with carriers, and dealing with government regulations, cloud-based freight forwarding software is available across all aspects of the logistics process. In addition, freight forwarding software has the following unique advantages:

Automate and Streamline Your Logistics Operations

As freight forwarding software is closely related to logistics and transportation management software, it can be considered an industry-specific ERP solution for freight forwarders. These solutions are intended to allow your business operations to be managed in a fully integrated way.

When all internal modules are connected, freight forwarding systems eliminate the need to enter data twice since data can be imported and exported smoothly from one functionality to another.

The sales department can turn a quote into an order, which is then sent to a shipyard so the fulfillment process can begin. The accounting department can track paid and unpaid invoices from these orders to ensure no payments are owed.

In addition to keeping your data secure and safe, moving all shipping information electronically (through a freight forwarding platform) will also help by providing real-time data and reports.

Shipping manually involves a great deal of paperwork, such as original quotes, sales orders, bills of lading, warehouse documents, and any other needed documents. It is hard to respond to any changes made along the way when these pile up quickly.

Gain A Competitive Edge

Ideally, cloud-based freight forwarding software must be flexible and scalable, so you can add capabilities as your business grows. This means many solutions allow you to start with what you need and then add the rest as needed.

If your business is scalable, you can save on initial costs and expand as you grow. You may initially use your freight broker software one way, but you'll learn how to improve your business in critical areas through built-in analytics features.

You can track each shipment's cost and service level, for instance, using analytics to identify key supply chain segments to improve.

With your freight management software, you can better track your shipments at any given time by incorporating all shipping methods your business uses (road, rail, ocean, and air).

Combining and optimizing loads for cost-effectiveness and time savings allows you to differentiate between repeat business from clients and ensure your freight moves efficiently through the required supply chain channels.

Improve Tracking of Shipments

You can minimize judgment errors when you know where your freight is at all times. In addition, informing your customers of accurate shipping statuses will hopefully lower the administrative costs of tracking shipments and discovering bits of information.

If a customer wants to check the status of their freight, you can provide them with an accurate time frame and reassurance.

Which Factors Should You Consider When Purchasing Freight Forwarding Software for Your Business?

Many factors need to be considered before choosing a freight forwarding solution. Check out the following factors to help you decide which freight forwarder is right for you and your business.

Streamlined freight management

The freight forwarding management system should manage your transportation costs efficiently with comprehensive logistics software.

In addition to providing you with insights that will help you deal with freight-related challenges seamlessly and successfully, it should help you save costs while maintaining your service quality and ensuring customer satisfaction at the same time.

Efficient delivery of goods

Ideally, your online freight forwarding platform will allow you to plan well, eliminating the possibility of missing deadlines due to poor planning. Additionally, it should help assure package security and deliver goods to the right destination.

The web-based freight forwarding software must facilitate a smooth flow of goods from your location to your customers' location without incurring additional expenses.

Seamless integration with existing systems

You may already have some systems to handle various processes, so don't forget when considering the new best freight forwarding software.

Your global freight management system must work in sync with your existing ones to ensure the smooth operation of your business operations. Otherwise, your logistics management system might end up hindering your operations rather than facilitating them.

Try trial plans, opt for modular software, and choose only the functions you need for your business. This will make the decision more financially feasible if you choose a modular design.

Wide range of billing options

Explore the billing options available on freight forwarding system software while selecting it. Make sure it allows you to charge weekly, monthly, or yearly.

Besides, the system should be designed to capture and process data accurately to ensure that all information is accurate. A system that offers maximum flexibility on this front will be the best to consider.

Ability to share data with customers

Creating a system that allows you to share specific dashboards with your customers can make for increased deal transparency and improve the customer experience.

For instance, particular logistics management software lets you share real-time tracking of shipments dashboards with your customer for their specific order, which keeps your customer informed about the progress of their goods. As a result, both parties can see the exact location of their demands for the first time.

Processing invoices and monitoring costs

A system that automates invoice reconciliation will save time and make auditing seamless since every invoice can be time-stamped and includes comments. Make sure your system has both cost and invoicing features.

As a result of automating the invoice matching process, the system will alert your vendor directly if there are inconsistencies between the invoice and the original quote. Once your vendor has corrected the error, you can consider your invoice.