Cutting Days-to-Cash from 47 to 28 — How Centrix Automates Settlements, Invoices, and A/R

The most expensive number in your business is the one you're not measuring

DSO — Days Sales Outstanding — is the number of days between delivering a load and collecting the cash. Industry average in trucking is 39 days. Mid-size carriers running on legacy A/R workflows often sit at 47–55 days. The number drives factoring spend, working capital tied up in receivables, and the rate at which you can grow the fleet.

A carrier doing $12M in annual revenue with a 47-day DSO has ~$1.55M of cash tied up in receivables at any given moment. Cut that to 28 days and you free $623K of cash — without a single new load. Most of that improvement isn't "chase customers harder." It's: invoices going out faster, deductions resolving faster, factoring submissions submitted in clean batches, and driver settlements running automatically so the back office isn't the bottleneck.

Centrix's settlements and A/R layer attacks all four.

The four legs of cash flow Centrix automates

1. Driver settlements

Driver pay is the most repetitive, most error-prone, most "we'll catch up Friday" workflow in the back office. Centrix imports settlements from Alvys (via the report export at app.alvys.com/#/reports/statement/list — the public API doesn't expose settlements directly), reconciles against logged miles, deductions, advances, fuel transactions, and per-load pay structures, and generates the per-driver pay run.

Pay structures supported out of the box:

• Per-mile (with loaded-vs-empty differentials)
• Per-load (flat or percent of revenue)
• Percent of revenue
• Hourly
• Salary
• Hybrid (per-mile + bonus + percent)

Deductions tracked:

• Fuel advances
• Cash advances
• Truck lease / lease-purchase payments
• Insurance contributions
• Drug-test pool fees
• Equipment damage
• IFTA pass-throughs

The settlement is generated, reviewed by the accounting role (RBAC permission ``finance:settlements``), and pushed to the bank via the existing payroll process. Carriers cut settlement-prep time from 8–14 hours per pay cycle to 1–2 hours, with materially fewer errors.

2. Invoice generation and submission

When a load delivers in Alvys, Centrix triggers the invoice workflow:

• Pull the rate confirmation, BOL, and POD from the load record
• Apply customer-specific invoice formatting (some customers want PDF + EDI,

some want PDF only, some want a portal upload)

• Apply detention, lumper, layover, TONU as separate line items
• Submit to the customer's preferred channel: email, EDI, portal, or factor

Median time-to-invoice on managed fleets: <24 hours from POD scan, down from 3–5 days. That's 2–4 days off DSO before any other change.

3. Detention and accessorial recovery

Detention recovery is a textbook example of work the back office knows how to do but never has time to do. A 2-hour detention on a $1,800 load is $80 of detention, less the $20 it costs in time to bill it — net $60. Multiplied across 2,400 loads/year × 22% with detention exposure × $84 average — that's $44K–$68K of revenue per year that's already earned, and the only question is whether you bill for it.

Centrix flags every load with stop-time over the customer's free-time threshold, builds the accessorial automatically, and routes it to the dispatcher for review. Accessorial recovery rate on managed fleets averages 68% — versus 25–30% on legacy back-office workflows.

4. Customer health and collections

Not every customer pays on time, and not every customer pays at all. The ``customer_health`` service tracks per-customer payment history:

• Average days-to-pay
• Trend (paying slower? paying faster?)
• Open A/R balance vs credit limit
• Disputes outstanding
• Last payment date

Customers paying slower than their historical average get flagged. Customers exceeding credit limits get held at the next-load decision (configurable). The collections workflow surfaces accounts that need follow-up, ranked by exposure.

The factoring math

Most mid-size carriers factor a portion of receivables. Factoring rates run 1.5–3% per invoice, depending on age, customer credit, and factor relationship. A carrier factoring 60% of a $12M book at 2.2% pays $158K/year in factoring fees.

Cutting DSO from 47 to 28 days reduces the amount you need to factor, because more invoices land in cash before they age into the factoring window. Median fee reduction on managed fleets: 30–45%, or $47K–$71K saved per year on a $12M book.

Cash flow forecasting

Once invoice generation, payment history, and customer health all live in the same database, cash flow forecasting becomes a derivable thing rather than a guess. Centrix's CFO dashboard projects:

• Expected cash inflow next 7 / 30 / 60 days
• Expected outflow (settlements, fuel, insurance, lease, fixed)
• Net position by week
• Sensitivity to top 5 customers

The forecast is reconciled against actuals weekly and the model improves over time. CFOs report the forecast running within ±5% of actuals after 90 days, which is more than enough to make line-of-credit and capex decisions confidently.

Where the data lives

• Alvys load and trip data: `alvys_db` (synced every 5 minutes, rolling 50-page

Completed-load backfill)

• Driver settlements: imported from Alvys settlement export
• Customer payment history: tracked in the consolidated_finance service
• QuickBooks reconciliation: `qb_sync` service for invoice and payment

bidirectional sync

• Fuel reconciliation: tied back through Relay Fuel data

The accounting role (``finance:invoices``, ``finance:settlements``) sees all of this in a single dashboard. The dispatcher role sees only what's relevant to their bookings.

Where to start

If you're a 30–150 truck carrier still running A/R on spreadsheets and Friday catch-up sessions:

• Run the time-to-invoice audit first — most carriers find the first 5–10 days

of DSO living in the gap between POD scan and invoice submission. Closing this gap alone is usually $200K+ of working capital freed.

• The detention recovery workflow pays for the platform on a 50-truck fleet.

The unbilled accessorial dollars are real and they're large.

• The driver settlement automation is the highest-touch, highest-trust

change — most accounting roles want to run it in shadow mode for 30 days before going live, and Centrix supports that.

See the cash-flow stack — bring your last 90 days of A/R aging and we'll show you exactly where the days-to-cash live.