April 2024
Discovering the perfect digital transformation solution can revolutionize freight forwarding and shipping business operations. Logistaas, a comprehensive Transportation Management System (TMS), presents four unique subscription options to meet various industry needs. Whether managing sales and pricing or executing digital freight forwarding operations, Logistaas empowers businesses to streamline operations, elevate customer service, and drive data-based decisions. This blog delves into each subscription option, spotlighting their distinct advantages and how they align with the evolving requirements of contemporary freight forwarders.
Optimizing Sales in Freight Forwarding: The CRM-Only Plan
The CRM-only plan is custom-made for sales teams operating in the freight forwarding or shipping industries, with a strong focus on sales and pricing management functionalities. This plan is particularly beneficial for those seeking to integrate a CRM with their existing Transportation Management System (TMS), simplifying sales processes without needing full operational features. It’s a perfect fit for businesses that prioritize enhancing customer relationships and sales efficiency while ensuring compatibility with other logistical software solutions. It includes the Sales and Pricing Management feature.
Sales and Pricing Management Feature
The Customer Relationship Management module in Logistaas’s transportation management system helps freight forwarders manage their sales process. Unlike generic CRM solutions, every detail in every feature of Logistaas’s CRM module has been designed to cater to the sales, pricing, and quotation processes in shipping and freight forwarding.
What does it do?
Streamlined Sales Workflow: Manage your sales process, from managing inquiries to creating quotations and offers. Monitor your sales activities and easily maintain client opportunities.
Dynamic Pricing Strategies: Simplify your pricing approach by uploading tariffs, defining pricing tiers, and sending rate requests to agents and vendors effortlessly. Stay competitive and enhance your pricing strategies.
Task Optimization: Automated assignments and reminders can improve task management and ensure your team stays on top of critical activities and deadlines.
Data-Driven Insights: Gain valuable insights into your sales performance with detailed reports on client activity, quotations, and user productivity. Make informed decisions to drive your business’s profitability.
Optimizing Operations: The Professional Plan
The Professional subscription from Logistaas is a comprehensive TMS solution encompassing sales and pricing management, finance management, and operational management alongside a basic online customer portal. This package is optimal for businesses seeking a robust, all-encompassing system to enhance their operational efficiency and customer interaction capabilities, positioning it as the premier TMS offering for modern freight forwarding operations.
Aside from Sales and Pricing Management, which we covered earlier, this plan includes:
Operations Management:
Logistaas’s transportation management system enables you to manage clearance, trade, and shipments. It is also integrated with several platforms, allowing freight forwarders to communicate with hundreds of airlines and shipping lines.
Workflow Optimization: Create personalized dashboards, to-do lists, and saved search templates. Set up automatic tasks and collaborate efficiently through file management and shared notes.
Shipment Handling Variety: Manage air, sea, land, customs clearance, inbound, outbound, domestic, cross-trade, consolidated, transhipment, and multimodal shipments.
Carrier Communication: Through seamless integrations, submit booking requests and shipping instructions to 50+ container carriers and send eAWB data to 100+ airlines.
Consolidation and Transshipment Management: Create consolidations, move shipments between consolidations, and efficiently manage transshipments.
Finance Management:
The finance management module on Logistaas’s transportation management system enables you to manage your accounts receivables and payables accurately and efficiently.
Comprehensive Financial Control: Register vendor invoices, manage received and paid payments, and set up credit facilities for customers and vendors, ensuring effective financial management.
Invoicing Efficiency: Easily generate invoices for single or multiple shipments, streamline the billing process, and maintain billing accuracy by importing rates directly into shipments.
Localization and Compliance: Ready for localization, facilitating integration with accounting systems, compliance with tax schemes and e-invoice requirements, and retrieval of exchange rates from central banks.
Enhanced Visibility and Reporting: Gain visibility into financial transactions with dynamic profit reports, aging, and statements of account reports.
Basic Customer Portal:
With Logistaas, every freight forwarder can go digital. Every company using our transportation management system can offer customers a modern online portal to elevate their experience.
When using the basic version of the customer portal, your clients can:
Submit Inquiries: Clients can easily submit inquiries for various shipment types.
View Offers: Clients can view and download offers from the freight forwarder.
Track Shipments: Clients can monitor the status of their shipments, including key details and references.
Upload Documents: Clients can upload and share all relevant documents from a centralized location.
Monitor Invoices and Payments: Clients can check the status of invoices and payments
Embracing Digital Transformation with Logistaas: The Digital Freight Forwarder Plan
For businesses aiming to embrace full digital transformation in freight forwarding, the Digital Freight Forwarder plan from Logistaas is ideal. This comprehensive subscription builds upon the Professional plan by incorporating a premium customer portal. This addition enriches client interaction and service management, facilitating a smoother transition to digital operations. Integrating all the essential modules with enhanced customer portal features paves the way for an effective digital freight forwarding journey, offering tools for advanced customer engagement and operational efficiency.
Premium Customer Portal:
By adding the premium version of the customer portal, you can give your clients the following features:
Comprehensive Dashboard: Clients access an exclusive dashboard for convenient task management, including searches, offers, bookings, shipments, and invoices.
Action Notifications: The portal includes an alert system to remind clients of crucial actions, helping them stay organized and efficient.
Direct Inquiry Submission: Clients can easily submit rate requests with mandatory shipment information, streamlining their response process.
Booking Requests: Clients request bookings directly from valid offers, reducing delays in the booking process.
Shipping Instructions: Clients efficiently revise cargo information on confirmed bookings, ensuring timely submission of accurate shipping instructions.
Document Upload: Clients and you can upload essential documents conveniently in one location, simplifying shipment operations.
Invoices and Reports: Clients access invoices, Statement of Account reports, and Dynamic Volume reports for easy customization and immediate retrieval of vital information.
You can also make your portal fully branded with your unique domain.
Comprehensive Accounting for Freight Forwarders
The Accountants plan is ideal for those seeking a comprehensive TMS solution, including everything from the Professional plan and a dedicated accounting module. This tier is designed for businesses requiring advanced financial management capabilities integrated seamlessly with freight forwarding operations. It combines sales, pricing, operations, and customer portal functionalities with a robust accounting module, offering a unified platform for managing all aspects of freight forwarding finance. This plan ensures that your financial data is accurately tracked, providing insights and efficiencies crucial for modern accounting practices in the logistics industry.
The addition of the Accounting Module will bring forth a suite of new benefits that will enhance your experience using the Loistaas TMS:
Seamless Connectivity: Unlike other accounting solutions that require complex integrations, our accounting module is native to Logistaas. You can say goodbye to the hassle of managing integrations or double work to update payments and invoices. With Logistaas, your accounting processes are streamlined, efficient, and hassle-free.
Tailored to Freight Forwarders: We understand the unique needs of freight forwarders, which is why many details in our accounting module are specifically tailored to your industry. From dimensions to layers and even e-invoicing, our module is designed to meet your business’s specific requirements, ensuring accuracy and efficiency every step of the way.
Our accounting module offers all the core features you might require:
- Efficient management of invoices and payments
- Accurate recording of financial transactions
- Tracking and management of assets
- Monitoring and management of operational expenses
- Generation of essential financial reports tailored for freight forwarding operations
Other Features:
- Handling of multiple currencies for international operations
- Detailed records for transparency and auditing
- Security and confidentiality of financial data
- Visual insights and industry-specific analytics for quick decision-making
- Automatic application of tax regulations to transactions and reports
- Customizable charts of accounts
- Reconciliation journal entries
- Advanced E-invoicing integration in 8 countries
Navigating the freight forwarding and shipping landscape requires tailored solutions that cater to diverse business needs. Logistaas offers a spectrum of subscription plans, each designed to enhance different aspects of your operations. From sales-focused CRM to the comprehensive digital transformation with the Digital Freight Forwarder plan and the detailed financial oversight provided by the Accountants plan, Logistaas equips businesses to streamline operations, elevate customer experiences, and harness data for strategic decision-making. Each plan is a step towards optimizing freight forwarding operations, ensuring scalability, efficiency, and a competitive edge in the digital age.
Explore Logistaas’s offerings to find the perfect fit for your business’s current and future needs and take the next step in your digital transformation journey.