Logistics & transport debt recovery

Freight invoices, charter fees, and warehousing charges. When shipments are delivered but payment isn't, we recover it.

JAVIER, Operations director, Valencia. Delivered on time. The invoice took the scenic route. A local collector finds the invoice. It was never at customs. Freight delivered. Freight paid.

Logistics is an industry where the evidence of delivery is literally built into the business model. There are bills of lading, CMR consignment notes, proof of delivery signatures, GPS tracking data, timestamped photographs of containers being unloaded, and warehouse management systems recording every pallet movement to the nearest centimetre. And yet, somehow, invoices for services that are documented more thoroughly than most criminal investigations manage to go unpaid for months.

The freight invoice sits in a unique position in the commercial food chain. The goods have moved. The carrier's truck has returned to base. The fuel has been burned, the driver has been paid, the toll charges have been debited. The only thing that hasn't happened is the one thing that was supposed to happen 30 days ago: payment. The freight forwarder's accounts payable department offers reassurance that the invoice is "in the system" — a phrase that, in logistics finance, roughly translates to "we have acknowledged its existence and intend to do nothing about it for the foreseeable future."