At Lojistic, we consider GL coding to be a soft cost savings. We offer it to all of our clients for free. But before we get into that, let's clarify what GL coding is.
What is GL Coding?
First, GL stands for General Ledger. Essentially, it's assigning shipping costs to certain departments or business units.
Let's say your company ships out hundreds or thousands of packages a day. Different departments are often responsible for certain packages or shipments going out. Some of those packages might be associated with your marketing department, for example, and others may be associated with sales.
With GL coding, you can assign codes to shipments and associate those shipments with certain departments or business units.
How Does GL Coding Help Businesses Save Time?
The accounting department is responsible for GL coding most of the time. In other words, somebody on your accounting team is responsible for identifying shipments and determining what GL codes go with those particular shipments.
We just spoke to a prospect, for example, that has someone spending an entire day each week GL coding shipments. That’s eight hours of staff time a week. That's a significant amount of time for someone on your team to go through shipments manually and make sure that there are GL codes associated with every shipment.
We were able to step in and automate that process. First, it requires understanding the business rules that a particular shipper has in place. From there, we can automate the assignment of those GL codes or apply those rules to their shipments.
Essentially, any shipment that doesn't meet the criteria is called out. And that creates an opportunity to determine what we need to do with that particular shipment. There might be a new GL coding rule that needs to be set up. Or we'll figure out why that shipment didn't meet the criteria of an existing GL code. In that case, we'll determine where the costs of that particular shipment need to be assigned.
Additional Benefits of Shipping with Lojistic
A shipper number is almost like a credit card. And if I have your shipper number as a current or former employee, I could potentially use your account number without authorization.
One of the additional benefits of Lojistic’s service is that GL coding makes sure that all of the shipments charged to your account number are authorized. If there are shipments that don't meet your GL coding rules, we flag those as shipments to look at. In other words, fraud protection is baked in as an opportunity to identify shipments that are going out without authorization.
How Can Lojistic Users Get GL Coding?
Lojistic can take over for organizations that are already using GL coding rules and automate that process.
In the example above, where someone was coding for an entire day each week, we can automate that process and give them back those eight hours. And that time translates, obviously, into money.
We also work with other companies that are not doing any GL coding to set it up for them. Essentially, we help them set up the rules that they want to create so that they can assign certain shipments back to certain departments, business units, or cost centers.
If they want to handle that themselves, they can, but if they want Lojistic to handle that for them, we're happy to do that as well.
One of the features of Lojistic’s audit and refund recovery services is that we provide GL coding at no extra costs. We handle coding for hundreds of our clients. We’re very good at it. We have the process down because we've mostly automated it.
There are always shipments that fall outside of any rules that have been identified, but it's a major time and money savings for those clients, and their accounting departments love us as a result.