Billable warehouse work, captured on the floor and priced before the invoice.

Most 3PL invoices are rebuilt after the fact. Receiving and pick fees come out of the WMS (warehouse management system), because the WMS already counts them. Everything else, the VAS (value-added services) such as relabeling, kitting and bundling, the storage tier changes and the accessorial charges, lives on a whiteboard, a paper log or a shared spreadsheet that someone fills in later.

At month end the person doing billing works from that sheet. A job nobody wrote down never reaches the invoice, and a job written down twice gets billed twice and disputed. Nobody forgot on purpose. A good employee was handed a process that depends on memory.

1. Input. The client's rate card, line by line: storage tiers, receiving, pick and pack, each VAS task and each accessorial, with the unit it is billed in (per pallet, per carton, per unit, per hour).
2. Capture. When a job starts or ends, the person doing it scans the order or pallet and taps the task on the scanner or phone they already carry: relabel, kit, rework, after-hours receipt. Quantity and time are recorded with their name. Storage tier changes are worked out from the pallet dates, with no tap needed.
3. Check. Each event is matched to that client's rate card line. The same task tapped twice on the same order inside a short window is marked as a possible duplicate instead of being billed twice.
4. Exception. Work with no matching rate, such as a kitting job for a client whose contract has no kitting line, is held for the account manager. It is never dropped and never priced by guess.
5. Record. Billing gets a draft for each client with every line traced back to the scan, the person and the time. They review it, change what needs changing and send the invoice from the system they already use.

• Your WMS keeps what it already does. Where it offers an API or a data export, we read the receiving and order data from it, so a relabel is tied to the same order number your team already uses. Which data we can read depends on that system's API or export.
• The billing sheet is what goes. If month-end billing is a spreadsheet rebuilt by hand, that spreadsheet is the part this replaces. If you already bill from an accounting or billing system, the draft is handed to it as a file or through its API, where it has one. Matching each event to a rate card line, and reading rates out of a signed contract in the first place, is AI automation for logistics paperwork. Cargohold, our own logistics software, has a 3PL billing module built around rate cards and billing runs, if you want to see a finished version of this idea.
• No new hardware. It runs on the scanners, phones and tablets your floor already uses. A tap that takes longer than the job is a tap nobody makes, so the capture is kept to a scan and one choice.

The system prices what it can match and holds what it cannot. Whether an unpriced job is billed, quoted to the client first or written off as a favor stays with your account manager, and a write-off needs a reason. Billing approves every draft before an invoice goes out. Rate cards are changed only by the people you name.