How to invoice a load and work with factoring

Who this is for: owners, office staff, and dispatchers who bill.

An invoice belongs to exactly one load and follows a fixed path. Each step is recorded, so at any moment you can answer "where is this money?" without opening a spreadsheet.

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Before you invoice

The load needs:

• A rate. A load with no rate cannot be invoiced.
• To be delivered — or better, POD received, with the signed POD filed against the load.

1. Set up your factoring company (once)

Invoices → Factoring companies, or Settings. Record the factor's name, contact email, the submissions email they want invoices sent to, and your advance rate. If you do not factor, skip this — invoices work fine without it.

2. Create the invoice

From the load, or from Invoices → New. Pick the load, confirm the amount, and choose a factoring company if this one is being factored. An invoice number is assigned automatically if you do not supply one.

A load can only have one live invoice at a time. If you need to reissue, void the existing one first — the voided invoice stays on the record.

3. Walk it through the statuses

Submit only records that the invoice went out. To actually send it, use the factoring packet — see the next section.

The recipient is picked in this order: whatever you type, then your factor's submissions email, then their contact email, then the broker's email on the load. Check it before sending.

Record advance applies only to factored invoices, and only once they are submitted.

Record payment needs the invoice submitted first, and will not apply to a voided invoice.

Void is available up until the invoice is paid or closed, and is limited to owners and admins. After that, issue a credit instead. Voiding walks the load back out of "invoiced", so it reappears in your ready-to-invoice list rather than silently disappearing with nothing billed.

4. Send the factoring packet

Your factor does not want three attachments and a covering note typed out by hand. They want one PDF with the invoice, the signed rate confirmation and the proof of delivery in it. The Factoring packet card on the invoice builds exactly that and emails it.

Check the paperwork first

The card leads with a checklist, and that is the point of it. A factor that receives a packet without a POD does not ring you up and ask for the POD — it rejects the submission, and you find out days later that money you already burned fuel to earn is still sitting in float. Chasing a POD out of a driver takes one text on delivery day and a week once the invoice has bounced.

Two documents are treated as required:

• Rate confirmation — proves the rate you are billing was the rate agreed.
• Proof of delivery — proves the freight was delivered.

A bill of lading, lumper receipt or scale ticket is included when you have one and never blocks the send. Only those two are required, deliberately: a checklist that cries wolf about a scale ticket gets ignored on the day it is right about the POD.

Anything else on the load — fuel receipts, driver paperwork — is left out. A factor's clerk seeing a fuel receipt in a submission asks questions about a packet that was otherwise fine.

Then send it

1. Fix anything the checklist flags, or type a different recipient if the default is wrong.
2. Add a note if the factor needs to know something about this submission.
3. Send packet.

Sending it also marks a draft invoice submitted, so you do not do that twice.

Download packet gives you the identical PDF, which is what to use if you would rather send it from your own email, or if you just want to see what the factor will see.

When something is missing

The button changes to Send anyway and tells you what is absent. Some carriers genuinely do bill without a POD by arrangement, so this is not blocked outright — but it will not happen by accident, and the override is recorded against the invoice so there is an answer later if the factor short-pays.

Sending it twice

A second send needs Send again. A factor emailed two copies of one invoice by a double-click has to reconcile them, and that is a phone call you do not want. Use it when they tell you they never received the first one.

Several invoices in one email

Your factor would rather have the week in one submission than five emails, and the clerk on their side files by invoice. So on Invoices, tick the drafts and submitted invoices you want to send and a bar appears above the list. It checks every one of them the way the card does, tells you where the bundle is going, and sends one email with one PDF per invoice — each holding that invoice, its rate confirmation and its POD — and a schedule in the body listing every invoice, its load, its amount, and the total.

It will not send half a bundle. If one invoice is missing its POD, already went, or is voided, the bar names it and offers Remove from bundle so the rest can go cleanly. Send anyway still exists for the arrangement case, and it is recorded against each invoice it applied to.

Invoices that go to different places — two factors, or a factored invoice alongside one you bill yourself — are shown as the separate bundles they are. Untick one group and send the other, or type one recipient to send them all there if you know that is right.

If one gets forgotten

An invoice that exists but was never sent is money nobody has asked for, and it looks finished on the list. So the bell tells you: a draft that is still a draft after three days, and again at ten. If your shop sends packets from here, an invoice marked submitted with no packet sent gets the same nudge — if you emailed it yourself, dismiss it and it stays dismissed. Each threshold nudges once; after that the overdue alerts below take over.

Doing it automatically

Settings → Email the factoring packet when an invoice is submitted makes submitting an invoice send the packet. It is off until you turn it on.

An incomplete packet is still never sent automatically — submitting stops and tells you what is missing instead, and the invoice stays a draft. An invoice reading "submitted" when nobody was ever asked for the money is how you wait a month for a payment that was never requested.

5. Send it to QuickBooks

Connect QuickBooks once, under Settings → Integrations, and an invoice can go straight onto your books instead of being re-keyed by your accountant.

Connecting is a button, not a form — you are sent to Intuit, you pick the company, and you come back. Nothing to copy or paste.

What lands in QuickBooks

• The broker as the customer, created if they are not there already. The broker, not your factor — the factor collects the money but the broker is who owes it, and billing the factor would misstate what you are owed.
• One line for the rate, against a service item called Freight, with the load number and lane in the description. If you have no Freight item we make one against your existing income account. We will not create a new account in your chart of accounts — if you have no income account at all, the push stops and tells you.
• The payment, when you record one, applied against that invoice.

It will not push the same invoice twice, even if you click twice or the first attempt timed out. And it never reads anything back: QuickBooks stays the ledger, we only write to it.

Doing it automatically

Settings → Send invoices and payments to QuickBooks does it on submit and on payment. Off until you turn it on.

If QuickBooks is unreachable your invoice still saves — the push is simply retried the next time that invoice changes. You will not lose an invoice because Intuit was down.

If it stops working

Intuit connections expire after about 100 days of not being refreshed, and access can be revoked from inside QuickBooks. Either way the fix is the same: Settings → Integrations → Reconnect. The page shows when the current connection runs out, so it should not take you by surprise.

6. Watch the aging

Invoices → Aging buckets everything outstanding by how long it has been sitting. Invoices are also checked automatically, and you get a notification when one crosses 30, 45, 60, and 90 days. Each threshold notifies once — your bell does not fill up with the same invoice every few hours. Before any of that, an invoice that was never sent at all is nudged at three and ten days — see If one gets forgotten.

7. Get the PDF

Every invoice renders as a PDF from its detail page. It carries your company name, MC and DOT numbers, and the load details, so it can go straight to a broker who asks for a copy.

That is the invoice on its own. Download packet on the factoring packet card gives you the invoice plus the rate confirmation and POD merged behind it — that is the one a factor wants.

Related

• Dispatch a load and track it to delivery
• Run driver pay and dispatcher pay
• An invoice or pay statement will not save