You need to get paid quickly for your trucking company to keep its trucks on the road and moving. There are a few ways to help eliminate the possible 30-60+ days it can take some brokers and shippers to pay. From quick pay to factoring, let’s talk about how each can help your trucking business.
What is Quick Pay in Trucking?
With quick pay trucking, you haul a load, and the broker agrees to pay you more quickly than standard invoice payment terms ask for. With quick pay, you often get the funds within a few days to a week instead of the typical 30-60+ days. Brokers will charge a fee in exchange for quicker payment.
What is Factoring?
With factoring, you deliver the load, submit a copy of the invoice to your factoring company, and you get access to the funds usually within hours. A small percentage fee is deducted from each invoice when you use factoring.
Quick Pay vs. Factoring
Both quick pay and factoring will give you access to funds quickly. However, there are some differences between the two that are important to be aware of when deciding which one is best for your business.
Rates
Quick pay rates are all over the place. One may be lower, and another may be similar to a factoring rate, whereas another would be 5% or more.
Factoring rates are typically 2% – 3%.
What loads can it be used for?
The broker has to offer it as a payment option to use quick pay. Not all do, so if you rely on quick pay, you could limit the brokers you can accept loads from.
You can factor loads for all brokers and shippers approved by the factoring company. In order to be approved, the factor will run a credit check on the broker and shipper to help ensure they will pay you for the loads you haul. Additionally, factoring is flexible you choose which loads to factor and which loads you don’t. For instance, if you are working with a factoring company and a broker that offers a lower quick pay rate for their loads you can use quick pay for those loads and factor others.
Submitting the paperwork
With quick pay, you must send the documentation to each broker separately.
With factoring, everything goes to one place every time.
Following up if payment is not received from the broker or shipper
You have to do the follow-up when using quick pay. If the payment doesn’t go through, the broker typically won’t tell you if there are paperwork issues until you call to find out why you didn’t get the payment.
When you use factoring, the factoring company will handle all follow-up calls and help you ensure the paperwork you submit is accurate in advance of a late payment.
Additional benefits
Quick pay does not offer any additional benefits outside of paying you more quickly.
Factoring provides several benefits in addition to paying you quickly. The benefits include free credit checks, fuel cards, invoicing, processing, postage, collecting, and more. Additionaly, factoring companies have extensive knowledge and experience working with many brokers and shippers. For this reason, they know who is good to work with and who you might want to avoid.
After reading this list of quick pay vs. factoring, you might wonder which option puts more money into my pockets? From our experience, we would have to say it is usually factoring. Between the competitive rates, additional benefits, the amount of time it can save you, and freedom to take different loads from different brokers and shippers. However, there are a few of the bigger brokers out there that do have very low and competitive quick pay fees. If you have any additional questions about quick pay vs. factoring, please call us at (801) 676-0182.
