How a Digital Freight Forwarder Made Vendor Payments 300% Faster and Turned Same-Day Proof of Payment Into a Competitive Advantage
The Challenge
Shifl — a digital freight forwarding platform connecting shippers with logistics service providers (LSPs) — depended on fast, documented vendor payments to release freight shipments at multiple touchpoints in the supply chain. Physical check payments were slow to issue, slow to arrive, and prone to being lost in transit — each failure causing delays in shipment release that damaged client relationships. The manual payment process consumed approximately two hours of administrative time per team member per payment cycle. As Shifl scaled during a period of high shipping demand, the inability to provide same-day proof of payment to LSPs became an operational liability: freight would not move without confirmed payment, and the existing process could not deliver that confirmation at the speed the business required.
The Solution
Shifl implemented Melio's digital bill payment platform, integrated with QuickBooks, to automate ACH vendor payments with same-day proof-of-payment delivery. Invoices created in Shifl's proprietary logistics software synced through QuickBooks into Melio, eliminating manual data re-entry. ACH payments replaced physical checks, removing mailing delays and lost-check incidents entirely. Payment delegation and approval workflows were configured to match Shifl's internal authorisation structure. New LSP vendors could be onboarded to the payment system rapidly as the business scaled, without requiring manual process changes.
The Outcome
Payment speed increased 300% — LSPs now received payment and proof-of-payment confirmation on the same day, compared to the multi-day lead time of the previous check-based process. Administrative time per payment cycle fell by approximately two hours per team member, recovered from manual check preparation, mailing, and reconciliation. Same-day proof-of-payment delivery became a material competitive advantage: when freight holds are resolved within hours rather than days, Shifl could offer shippers more reliable shipment timelines than competitors still reliant on slower payment methods.
Strategic Takeaway
Shifl's payment problem is specific to freight forwarding: in a business where physical cargo sits at a point of transfer until payment is confirmed, payment speed is a service quality metric, not just an internal efficiency concern. A cheque that takes three days to arrive delays three days of freight movement — a cost borne by the shipper and visible in the service record. The 300% speed improvement resolves this at the process level, but the strategic gain is same-day proof of payment: a freight forwarder that can confirm payment on the day of instruction can guarantee release timelines that others cannot. In a competitive freight market where shippers make provider decisions partly on reliability, this capability is a differentiation lever, not just a back-office efficiency gain.
- In freight forwarding, payment speed is a customer-facing service capability — delays in LSP payment create delays in freight release that are visible to shippers and reflected in service reliability scores.
- ACH with digital proof of payment is not equivalent to faster cheques — it is a different operational capability, enabling same-day confirmation that physical cheques cannot match regardless of how quickly they are issued.
- Integrating payment tooling with the existing accounting stack (QuickBooks) eliminates re-entry overhead and ensures payment records and accounting records remain synchronised without manual reconciliation.
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