When billing is handled manually and without visibility, revenue leakage is bound to occur. Even worse, these leaks are hard to spot before they’ve done damage to your terminal’s bottomline.
A terminal’s approach to managing its billing operations has significant implications for the facility’s revenue generation, cash flow optimization, operations efficiency, and customer experience. If billing optimization is overlooked or ignored, terminals could be at risk of more widespread inefficiencies impacting revenue and long-term growth.
“Billing touches so many small parts of operations, from the billing process itself to inventory, containers, and terminal maneuvers,” says Riadna Nunez, Product Manager, Billing at Tideworks. “All of those connections contribute to making billing management more complicated for terminals.”
Therein lies the opportunity for operators: By treating billing as a strategic lever for efficiency and value creation, terminals can implement billing optimization tactics that maximize revenue potential, plug costly revenue leaks, and create a new competitive advantage to attract and retain customers.
Read on to learn more about the benefits of billing optimization for terminals and how you can get started.
The benefits of billing optimization
From operational improvements that support your employees to tangible business impact, billing optimization offers significant value to any terminal. Here are four key outcomes your terminal can achieve through an optimized billing process:
1. Plugging revenue leaks
Revenue leakage in terminals comes in many forms, including missed charges, outdated rates, inaccurate storage calculations, unclear billing start dates, and manual error. An optimized billing solution can significantly reduce the frequency of these leaks by automating timely, accurate billing processes across your terminal.
“We have one client, a small to mid-sized terminal, that does its own internal billing—which involves a lot of different systems talking to each other through Excel files,” says Suhas Jakkaraju, Product Manager, Billing at Tideworks. “But as these files are downloaded, validated, and uploaded to different systems, there’s an increased risk of data inconsistencies, delayed leak detection, and slower reconciliation.”
Another challenge in plugging these leaks is accounting for the unique rules and agreements between the terminal and individual customers. While one shipping line customer might allow seven free storage days, for example, another customer might only allow five days before fees begin to accrue. Keeping track of all of this is challenging and time-consuming without a digitized, automated billing solution.
“There’s also often a lack of clarity with operations about when billing should start,” Nunez says. “Should it begin the moment the container arrives at the terminal, or the day after? That kind of ambiguity can cause more revenue leakage.”
As terminal operations and workflows evolve, additional leakage can occur when billing processes aren’t fully established to ensure accurate revenue capture from those activities.
“That lack of alignment might cause terminals to miss out on billing opportunities—or even create gaps where services are provided but never charged for,” Nunez says. “Later, when you try to correct it, customers push back: ‘You didn’t charge me before, so why now?’ And then you’re in a dispute. That’s how revenue gets lost.”
2. Increasing operational efficiency, improving cash flow, and reducing costs
Manual billing processes are incredibly time-consuming and prone to human errors, resulting in additional time spent reworking those tasks.
“Another issue that comes up is when a new workflow is introduced and teams default to handling it manually—like creating invoices directly in the application,” says Nunez. “They may not realize there’s a way to configure a billing system to automate that process. But over time, the volume of that work grows, and manual billing becomes unmanageable.”
An optimized, automated approach to billing addresses several pain points for finance teams, resulting in cleaner books, better forecasting, and improved working capital. Faster, more accurate billing leads to quicker payments and fewer customer disputes, while streamlined billing allows terminal leaders to spend less time chasing payments—and more time helping the terminal run smoothly.
3. Enhancing the customer experience and building loyalty
Transparent, accurate, and timely billing is a gateway to improved customer trust and satisfaction. Fewer billing disputes results in smoother relationships with carriers and shippers, even as your optimized billing practices are capturing more revenue with greater consistency.
For improved visibility and more responsive customer service, billing optimization can also prioritize self-service billing portals and/or real-time updates that keep customers up-to-date with the latest information. As Jakkaraju points out, accuracy in these billing processes is even more critical since longer billing cycles mean that discrepancies will take even longer to identify.
“A high level of precision strengthens our relationship with customers,” Jakkaraju says. “It opens the door for enhancement requests and feedback—which we really value at Tideworks. We want our customers to tell us how we can improve, and when they see we’re listening and engaging, it builds loyalty.”
4. Gaining a competitive edge and enabling strategic growth
A modern, automated billing infrastructure supports scalable growth through increased service stability, faster deployments, and better accommodations for smaller carriers who want to work with your terminal. Through this optimized approach, terminals can more effectively meet customers where they’re at through flexible pricing models, new services, and bundled offerings.
These enhanced billing capabilities effectively expand your potential customer base and maximize revenue potential without creating any additional work for your billing team.
“If billing isn’t designed to scale up or down easily, then the product isn’t truly optimized, in my view,” Jakkaraju says. “Terminals may end up turning away certain carriers simply because of their size or volume. That’s where our product makes a difference—it allows terminals to scale billing operations up or down as needed, and it supports onboarding new partners and integrating with external systems like ERPs.”
How to get started with billing optimization
Impactful billing optimization doesn’t require a full overhaul of your billing operations. Instead, leaders can guide an incremental transformation that prioritizes high-impact changes that directly improve efficiency and revenue generation.
The best way to approach this process is at your own pace and through the lens of your organization’s unique needs. Here’s where to start:
Audit your current billing process
Start by identifying the gaps and leaks in your current billing operations. What processes are contributing to delays, errors, and revenue loss?
For many organizations, the most urgent areas of need will be manual processes that are critical to your terminal’s operations. From there, ops leaders will need to define these billing processes based in relation to the terminal’s operational workflows.
“You need to understand, ‘Okay, this is a service or charge we always bill for,’ and then focus on automating that,” Nunez says. “That’s critical, because sometimes there’s a rush to implement things quickly without fully analyzing how the software can support automation.”
Arguably the biggest challenge to any terminal’s billing optimization efforts is that many billing processes are still handled manually. Successful billing optimization will need to implement a system for digitizing and automating these processes for greater efficiency and value creation.
Look for high-impact wins
Inefficient or error-prone billing tasks likely offer the best value when seeking quick wins that can validate your billing optimization efforts. Rate application, accessorial fees, and exceptions are just a few examples of billing tasks that can be easily automated to quickly create new efficiencies and close revenue leaks.
Lean on automation capabilities and digital billing tools to implement changes that deliver immediate outcomes in terms of saving time, preventing revenue loss, and providing better customer service.
Bring in stakeholders
As you implement high-impact changes that build momentum for continued billing optimization, team up with finance, IT, and ops teams to collectively map out the full billing workflow across your terminal. Identify gaps in data flow, reporting, and billing visibility, and gather feedback on the pain points these limitations are creating both for individual teams and for the terminal as a whole.
Through this collaborative process, your billing optimization efforts can begin to focus on strategic changes that will support better revenue generation and growth over time.
“This visibility ties back to the core of what Tideworks’ billing product is meant to do: identify gaps and help predict incoming revenue,” says Jakkaraju. “Since we have access to historical invoice data and seasonality trends, we can use that to improve forecasting.”
Consider purpose-built solutions for terminal billing
General tools are rarely sufficient for the unique needs of marine and rail terminals. Effective billing optimization requires a platform that can account for the unique, complex needs of your terminal’s billing practices.
That’s why Tideworks offers a specialized billing product that integrates billing processes with the rest of your terminal operations. By centralizing data for easy access by different systems and enabling automation across your billing processes, Tideworks can help your terminal surface new revenue opportunities within your billing systems.
“If a process can’t be fully automated within the application—by setting parameters and scheduling outputs at your desired frequency—then you can’t introduce efficiency into your billing process,” says Jakkaraju. “That’s what our team focuses on: identifying those gaps and finding ways to automate and streamline.”
Tideworks’ billing product also offers real-time insights, customizable rules engines, and integrations with your existing tech stack, giving terminals the visibility and flexibility to customize and optimize billing on their own terms.
Billing isn’t only a back-office function, it’s a strategic asset
Terminals are leaving a lot of money on the table when they allow their billing to run on manual processes. By implementing a modern, flexible billing product that is configured to your unique operational needs, terminals can use billing optimization to recover revenue, streamline workflows, provide a more inclusive customer experience, and set the stage for sustainable long-term growth.
Imagine what’s possible with the right billing tools in place. Better yet, see for yourself—contact Tideworks to find out how we can transform billing practices in your terminal.