The real cost of running freight across separate carrier portals.
Lost time is the most visible cost, but the greater expense is often missing the chance to use a more cost-effective carrier.
Most businesses do not intend to manage multiple carrier portals; it happens gradually. Each new carrier adds another portal and set of credentials. Over time, shipping freight entails navigating several websites, each having unique logins and interfaces. This process develops unintentionally, not by design.
While this approach assures freight is shipped, the true cost is often higher than it appears.
The visible cost, and the bigger one underneath it
The most apparent cost is time. Logging in, re-entering consignment details, printing labels, and copying tracking numbers can add three to four minutes per shipment. For a business shipping 150 consignments daily, saving just two minutes per order equals five hours each day, nearly a full-time position spent on administrative tasks. Calculating your own figures often uncovers considerable inefficiencies.
But the time is the part you can see, and it isn’t the expensive part. The expensive part is quieter.
When quoting multiple carriers requires logging into separate portals, the process becomes too time-consuming to justify. As a result, you default to your usual carrier and route, often without verifying whether another option is more cost-effective or efficient. The intended flexibility of a multi-carrier setup is lost, as the complexity discourages comparison at the critical moment of booking.
This default incurs a cost that often exceeds the value of saved time. It reflects missed savings from not selecting the most economical carrier, multiplied across thousands of shipments.
The costs that show up later
Additional hidden costs often arise at undesirable times.
Freight data becomes fragmented, with tracking information stored in separate portals. There is no centralised view of shipments, carriers, costs, or performance. When reviewing carrier performance or renegotiating rates, the necessary data is dispersed across multiple systems, making analysis difficult.
Customer service is also affected. A “where’s my order” call requires identifying the carrier, finding the correct portal, logging in, and searching while the customer waits. Repeating this process throughout the day substantially affects the team’s efficiency.
There is also a risk that critical knowledge about portal usage, logins, and carrier-specific requirements is held by only a few individuals. If these employees are absent or leave the company, this expertise is lost.
When it’s fine, and when it isn’t
None of this makes a carrier’s portal a poor tool. A portal serves its purpose, and at low volume with one or two carriers, the cost of managing them is minimal. However, the cost is not zero, and it increases as you add lanes, carriers, and shipments. Handling time, lack of rate visibility, and scattered data may seem minor at first but eventually turn significant.
It is important to watch for this tipping point. Many businesses cross it without realising and continue to incur costs before anyone evaluates them. Knowing these costs allows you to address issues promptly rather than discovering them much later.
Bring it into one place
The solution is to consolidate all carriers into one platform. Quote, book, print labels, and track shipments from a single screen, with one consolidated record. Use one login instead of several, and enter consignment details only once. Most importantly, every carrier’s rate is visible at booking, making it easy to choose the best option by default.
The benefits appear quickly. You recover hours previously lost switching between screens and regain the ability to compare rates, which delivers real savings. Tracking is centralised, so a “where’s my order” question can be answered in seconds. With all shipments managed in one system, you have a complete, consolidated record for future rate reviews.
That is why we built Sentaro: a single platform to quote, compare, book, and track across all your carriers, making it easy to select the right carrier for every consignment. Whatever solution you use, the test remains the same. Count the number of logins required to process a consignment and consider the associated cost.
