Freight Trouble Shooting

If you are creating a scale ticket in Levridge, and it’s not creating a freight bill as it should, here are a few things you can check.

There are a few data fields on the Scale ticket that are used to trigger the creation of a freight bill. The carrier, the carrier service, and the terms of delivery. You must make a selection in all three to result in the creation of a freight bill. In addition, make sure you have selected both a customer and a warehouse. You will need to make sure that the address for the customer and the warehouse both have a zip code. For inbound scale tickets, the system will look to the warehouse address to determine the “To” location and the ship from address to determine the “From” address. It will take those 2 zip codes and look them up in the freight rates table to calculate the freight bill and amount. It’s the opposite for outbound tickets, The “From” zip code will come from the warehouse address and the “To” zip code will come from the “Ship to” address on the scale ticket. Make sure there are addresses with zip codes setup on both the customer ship to/from and the warehouse.

Check the freight carrier being selected. Make sure it’s setup to use freight. In the freight carrier setup screen, there is a “Activate shipping carrier” Yes/No field. Make sure that it is set to “Yes”. Also, there’s a “Activate carrier rating”. Make sure it is set to “Yes”. And in order to pay a freight bill, make sure a vendor account is selected. In addition, in the “Services” fast tab, make sure you have selected a carrier service, outbound governing freight, transfer governing freight, and a freight expense account. These field will help calculate the proper dollar amount of freight for the selected freight carrier and carrier service. The carrier service on the scale ticket must match a carrier service on the freight carrier to calculate a freight bill. Carrier services are used to different rate structures for the same carrier for different products. That is, perhaps carrier X charges $.25/per Bushel from point A to point B when hauling corn, but if hauling wheat, then maybe charge $.12 / per bushel. In that case, we would setup 2 carrier services, one for corn and one for wheat.

To calculate a freight amount, a freight rate for the freight carrier and carrier service must be setup in the freight rate screen. In the General fast tab, there is a “Freight rate per” field. Make sure to select either per load or per unit. Freight rates are setup from a zip code to a zip code. The from and to zip code combination matters. If you have a From Zip Code A and a To Zip Code of B with a rate of $100. And you want to calculate freight from B to A, with a different, or even the same rate, you need to setup both directions.

Delivery terms

When calculating the freight bill, we only look to one setting on the delivery terms setup. The setting, in the Transportation fast tab for “Pickup”. On Inbound tickets, if we are paying the freight, we look for a setting of Pick-up. That means we are going to pickup the grain and thus are responsible to pay the freight carrier. On outbound tickets, pickup means that our customer is going to come and pickup the product, so we are not responsible for freight carrier payment. So, in order to create a freight bill for inbound tickets, use a delivery term that is set to “Pickup”. To create a freight bill for outbound scale tickets, use a delivery term that is NOT set to “Pickup”.

If the system never calculates any freight bills, perhaps it a system configuration issue. Look to the Freight rate parameters screen. This houses a few settings that are used to calculate the freight amount with Levridge scale tickets. Make sure you have the Break Master set to “Weight”, the Rating metadata ID set to “P2P” and the Rate engines set to “P2PWeight”.