Simplifying Billing for 3PLs

Client
Brooklyn-Based 3PL
Service
Product Design / User Research / Entrepreneurship
impact
We tackled billing challenges faced by 3PL companies and their clients. By combining automation with user-centered design, we streamlined complex billing processes and improved transparency between 3PLs and their brands. The result was a solution that saved hours for 3PL managers and improved trust with their brands.
Year
2024

Who's Involved

Third-Party Logistics (3PL) Company
A Third-Party Logistics (3PL) company helps businesses (Brands) manage their supply chain operations.

For example, a Brand may hire a 3PL to:
1. Store products in their warehouses.
2. Package and ship orders directly to customers or retail stores.
3. Manage returns from customers.

Essentially, a 3PL acts as the behind-the-scenes logistics partner, allowing Brands to focus instead on growing their business.
Brands
In our case, the brands who hire a 3PL are small brands who are getting off the ground. They vary from selling granola, to musical instruments, to luxury coats.

All of brand owners have a personal relationship with the 3PL and communicate on a regular basis with the 3PL management about work being done with their brand’s products.

What research did we do?

Through referrals from our 3PL design partner, we met with over a dozen 3PL owners and managers to learn more about their business and their daily pain points.
12
3PL Owners & Managers interviewed
6
Logistics startup founders interviewed
3
Brand owners interviewed
opportunity 1
Manual
Billing Process
3PL Manager
"[I have to] manually adjust the file to include the formulas from the previous invoice excel file."
3PL Owner
"Billing definitely keeps me up at night, and making sure that our warehouse team is doing the correct things every single time."
Brand Owner
“We once missed $30K of postage charges."
opportunity 2
Fronting Money
to Brands
3PL Manager
"For everything else, we do billing once a month. We're pretty much investing in the [Brand] for the month, but we want to change that."
3PL Owner
"Twice monthly, we are floating that cost up to 14 days, credit card, we hope we collect on it, if we don’t collect on time we are offering interest-free loans."
opportunity 3
Lack of Billing
Transparency
Brand Owner
“When they do a project for us, we don’t know what they’re actually doing until we get the bill.”

3PL's Billing Workflow

Old Workflow
New Workflow
The old workflow would take a 3PL Manager several hours to complete.
Our new workflow cut billing time down to only a few minutes.
Export raw order data from their WMS
(Warehouse Management System)
Import raw order data into Microsoft Excel
Customize (huge) Excel sheet to match the company workflow
Referencing the Excel data, use Bill.com to generate invoices one-by-one
Send invoices individually to each client
(100+ clients in our case)
Cross fingers that everything was accurate and sent appropriately.
Wait 1-4 weeks to receive payment from clients
Send all auto-generated invoices with one click.
Track clients down who haven’t paid / Correct errors made
Automatically deduct payment from client’s Wallet
Repeat.
Export raw order data from their WMS
(Warehouse Management System)
Import raw order data into Microsoft Excel
Customize (huge) Excel sheet to match the company workflow
Referencing the Excel data, use Bill.com to generate invoices one-by-one
Send invoices individually to each client
(100+ brands in our case)
Cross fingers that everything was accurate and sent appropriately.
Wait 1-4 weeks to receive payment from clients
Send all auto-generated invoices with one click.
Track clients down who haven’t paid / Correct errors made
Automatically deduct payment from client’s Wallet
Repeat

Billing Page Re-Design

Our developer built a solution to gather data from the 3PL’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) and automate the creation of invoices. However, the experience was visually overwhelming and clunky. I re-designed the existing UX to be more intuitive.

Automated Billing Dashboard

We created a simple dashboard that pulls data from the 3PL’s Warehouse Management System (WMS), and creates invoices for each client based on the 3PL’s specific fee structure & general workflow. All of this is done automatically.

The 3PL manager can send all invoices at once, with one button click.
Opportunities Addressed
Stressful & Manual Billing Process
Lack of Billing Trasparency

Keeping Data Accurate

We’ve added a visual indicator to display when WMS data is successfully imported into our app, giving 3PL managers confidence in their data accuracy.

Brand Page & Wallet

Transparency for Brands & 3PLs

We gave each brand their own page, that provides two major benefits:
‍
1. Real-time updates on how their invoice is accruing based on the work being done.
2. Access to a 3PL “Wallet” where they can view and add funds used for 3PL services.

This alleviates the uncertainty of both Brand and 3PL, by providing complete transparency into the work being done, cost of labor, and the money available to spend.
Opportunities Addressed
Fronting Money to Brands
Lack of Billing Trasparency

Filling the Wallet

Brand managers can fill their 3PL wallet through submitting a Stripe payment.

Transaction History

To monitor transactions between the Brand and the 3PL, both parties have access to the transaction history of the wallet.

Page Responsiveness

All pages of the app are designed to be fully responsive and legible on any device.