Cash flow forecasting for trucking and freight.
Fuel goes out at the pump. Drivers get paid every week. Brokers pay in 30 to 45 days once the paperwork clears. Arclite reads your QuickBooks Online books and puts both clocks on one calendar, thirteen weeks out.
The truck runs on a weekly clock. The money runs on a monthly one.
Carriers, owner-operators with a few trucks, and brokers all live the same split. Everything it takes to move a load is paid now. Everything you earn for moving it arrives a month or more later.
What actually times your cash.
These are not edge cases. This is a normal month in freight, and it is why a fleet that is making money can still be short the week a truck needs tires.
- Fuel is paid at the pumpNo terms, no float. It leaves the account the day the driver swipes, load by load.
- Drivers are paid weeklyWeekly or per settlement, whether or not a single broker has funded anything that week.
- Insurance and notes are fixedMonthly, same amount, no negotiating. They land whether the trucks rolled or sat.
- Brokers pay on 30 to 45 day termsAnd the clock does not start until the paperwork clears. A missing BOL is a two week delay nobody tells you about.
- Detention and lumpers come out of your pocketYou advance them at the dock and get reimbursed late, if the billing is clean. You are financing the shipper for free.
Putting those two clocks on one calendar is the entire job of the 13-week cash flow forecast. If you want the underlying numbers, we keep data on how late freight pays.
Built around how freight actually gets paid.
- Broker by broker timingEvery broker gets a payment profile from your own history, not from the terms on the rate con.
- Settlements and fuel in the weekDriver pay and fuel land on the weeks they actually go out, so the forecast matches your account.
- Fixed costs held fixedInsurance, truck notes and trailer leases do not move. Everything else gets ranked around them.
- Paperwork-cleared and still lateArclite finds the invoices that cleared and never funded, and drafts the chase. You approve it.
- Factor fewer loadsSee which receivables you can afford to wait on and which ones are paying for a tight week.
- Ask about next FridayBeans answers from your own ledger. Can I cover settlements if two brokers slip a week.
Factoring is a real tool. It is also an expensive way to fix a forecasting problem.
Be clear about what this is: Arclite is not a lender. It does not buy invoices, advance funds or replace your factor. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
Factoring solves a timing problem, and it solves it well. It also costs one to five percent of every invoice you put through it. A carrier who factors everything is paying that on receivables that would have funded in time anyway, because there was no way to tell the difference. Thirteen weeks of visibility is how you tell the difference, and the usual result is that you factor less.
- Factor what covers a tight weekIf week six is short and one broker's invoice fills the hole, that is a load worth factoring.
- Hold what you can wait onIf the money lands before you need it, waiting costs nothing and factoring costs a point or more.
- Keep your factorNothing here asks you to end a factoring relationship. It makes the decision a choice instead of a default.
Connected between loads.
1. Connect QuickBooks
One connection. About five minutes, no data entry.
2. Arclite reads the ledger
Open broker invoices, bills, balances, and how long each broker has really taken to pay you.
3. Thirteen weeks appear
Fuel and settlements out, broker payments in, with the tight week marked and its cause named.
4. Decide what to chase
Approve the follow-ups on the invoices that cleared and never funded. Factor only what you have to.
What goes out is not negotiable. What comes in can be moved.
Hold the fixed costs, then go get the invoices that cleared and never funded.
Settlements, insurance and the truck notes are fixed, so Arclite pins them and ranks everything else around them. On the other side, once the paperwork clears the money is owed. Arclite finds the broker invoices that are past that broker's own normal pay window and drafts the follow-up.
- Fixed stays fixedDriver settlements and notes never get moved to make a week look better. The other bills get ranked around them.
- Ranked by impactNot oldest first. The invoice that fixes week six gets chased first, with the load number and amount in it.
- You approve every oneNothing sends without you. Nothing posts to QuickBooks without your approval, and no payment moves on its own.
More on how the drafts get written in chase slow-paying brokers. It is $50 a month, 7-day trial, nothing charged until day 7, or see it work in four minutes first.
Questions from carriers and brokers.
No. Arclite is not a lender. It does not buy your invoices and it does not advance you money. Factoring is a legitimate tool and plenty of carriers should keep using it. What Arclite does is tell you which loads actually need it. Factoring costs one to five percent of the invoice, and most carriers factor everything because they cannot see which receivables they can afford to wait on. When you can see thirteen weeks, you can factor the ones that cover a tight week and hold the ones that do not.
That is the point of it. Each broker gets a payment profile built from your own history with them. The one who reliably funds in 28 days is modeled at 28. The one who takes 52 and only after three emails is modeled at 52. Nothing is timed to the terms on the rate confirmation, because those terms are not what shows up in your account.
As what they are: money that leaves on its own schedule. Fuel is paid at the pump, so it lands as it happens. Driver pay lands weekly or on the settlement cycle you run. Insurance, truck notes and trailer leases are fixed and monthly, so Arclite treats them as immovable and builds the rest of the forecast around them instead of on top of them.
Those are money you advanced on someone else's behalf, and they usually come back slowest. Once they are billed they sit in the forecast like any other receivable, timed to how that broker has actually paid you rather than to when the paperwork says they should. Seeing a few thousand dollars of advanced fees stacked into one week is often the first time an owner realizes how much of it they are carrying.
No. There is nothing to implement and no data entry. Arclite integrates directly with QuickBooks Online, reads what is already there, and builds the thirteen weeks. It is $50 a month with 100 credits included, extra credits are 50 cents each on your next invoice, and the trial is 7 days, with nothing charged until day 7. Cancel in one click.
Know the week before the fuel card does.
Connect QuickBooks Online and Arclite builds thirteen weeks from your own loads, settlements and broker history.
$50/month. 7-day trial. Cancel in one click.
$50 a month, 7-day trialsee it work in four minutes
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