Freight Spend Analytics

Freight spend analytics transforms raw shipping invoices and rate data into structured insight about where transportation dollars go and whether they're being spent efficiently. It's the financial lens on logistics operations – answering questions like "how much did we spend on LTL last quarter," "which lanes have the highest cost per shipment," and "is our freight spend growing faster than our revenue?"

A robust freight spend analytics program tracks total spend over time with trend analysis, spend broken down by carrier, mode, lane, customer, and business unit, rate variance – the gap between contracted rates and what was actually invoiced, accessorial charges as a percentage of total spend, and budget-to-actual comparisons. The depth of analysis possible depends entirely on data quality. If shipment records are incomplete or freight invoices aren't matched to orders, the analytics will have gaps that undermine confidence in the numbers.

Freight spend analytics matters because transportation is typically one of the largest variable costs a shipper controls. For food and beverage companies, freight can represent 8–15% of revenue. Even a 5% reduction in freight spend on a $10 million annual transportation budget is $500,000 – real margin improvement. But you can't reduce what you can't measure, and many mid-market shippers don't have a reliable answer to "what did we spend on freight last month?" until weeks after the month closes.

The most valuable freight analytics aren't backward-looking summaries but forward-looking signals – identifying that a carrier's accessorial charges are trending upward, that a lane's cost has drifted above market, or that a customer's shipping patterns are disproportionately expensive. This turns analytics from a reporting function into a decision-making tool.