"If you want to grow your 3PL business, Velix is a must-have tool. You won't be able to continue with Excel reconciliation at scale. Don't wait too long." – Irina, 3PL Operations Manager, Cesium
About the company
Cesium is a growing distributor of cell phone accessories, handling the full logistics chain from inbound receiving to customer billing and carrier reconciliation. In 2025 alone, they moved 4.6 million units and shipped over 2 million orders.
The problem
The Cost of Manual Reconciliation
Cesium wasn't short on volume, they were short on the time it took to bill for it.
Every billing cycle, Irina, Cesium's 3PL Operations Manager, spent the first two days manually checking tracking numbers one by one, mapping carrier charges to customers, and closing out every rebillable item from the month before.
Reconciliation alone across three customers took nearly a full day per billing cycle. The problem wasn't effort, it was the nature of carrier billing itself. Invoices arrived in inconsistent formats. Correction fees came with no reference to customers. Surcharges appeared under descriptions that matched nothing in the system. Without a tool built for that kind of matching, there was a structural limit to how much could be caught.
"I was doing it at about 70% accuracy," Irina said. "I was trying to be very accurate with everything I do, but 30% of issues were likely being missed."
That 30% wasn't a reflection of diligence, it was the ceiling of what manual reconciliation allows. At Cesium's volume, those uncaptured charges had a direct cost to the business: rebillable fees that couldn't be matched back to the right customer simply didn't get billed.
And it was only going to compound. As Cesium grew its customer base, more volume meant more invoices, more line items, more charges slipping through.
Eric, Cesium's Senior Operations Director, saw the ceiling clearly. Without a better solution, they would have hit a wall at five customers. The only way around it was headcount (~$60K a year to start, growing with every few new customers added) all working from the same spreadsheets the problem started with. "The cost curve would be very different," he said.
The real cost wasn't just in missed rebilling charges. It was where Irina's time was going: buried in spreadsheets. "I was paying a senior operator to verify numbers. That's not a reconciliation problem, that's a talent problem."
The solution
An Automated Workflow to Reconcile and Bill
Cesium needed a tool built for 3PL billing, not another spreadsheet. After implementing Velix, what used to take days now takes five minutes. Irina now sees carrier invoices matched to the right customer automatically with every line item accounted for, every rebillable charge captured, and a report ready to send to her customers.
The first moment she knew something had changed: she uploaded an invoice, spotted $200 in carrier overcharges her customer shouldn't be billed for, and could drill all the way down to the reason, the details, and exactly what needed to be passed back.
"We can catch them so easily now. It's all right there. I don't need to bother with Excel anymore."
That wasn't a one-time catch. Every billable activity captured, every discrepancy surfaced, every cost saving passed back to the customer, and any question answered in seconds.
The results
More Customers. Less Chaos.
Cesium didn't just speed up reconciliation. They changed what reconciliation meant for their business, and their customers.
Irina's role shifted from doing the Excel mapping work to supervising it. Her time went back to the business: onboarding new customers, improving operations, building for growth.
When a question comes up for an invoice, Irina no longer has to dig for the answer. Every carrier charge and shipment is already mapped to the right customer, with full visibility into each line item and an invoice ready to go.
The financial savings across recovered charges, time reclaimed, and headcount avoided adds up to over $70,000 in the first year — and will grow with more volume.
Cesium has grown its customer base more than 3x and the ceiling is nowhere in sight for delivering reliable, defensible, and transparent billing. "With the tool, we could add 20 to 30 customers and keep running efficiently," Eric said. "We can continue to triple our current customer base and more."
Month-end used to be the most stressful point in Cesium’s month. Now it's not.
"If you want to grow your 3PL business, Velix is a must-have tool. You won't be able to continue with Excel reconciliation at scale. Don't wait too long." – Irina, 3PL Operations Manager, Cesium
Looking ahead, Cesium is excited to grow with Velix expanding beyond reconciliation, into dispute resolution, carrier performance tracking, and rate card verification across the warehouse.
About Velix
Velix is the AI-powered financial operations platform built for logistics. We do the messy work of matching operational data across your ERP, WMS, TMS, and carrier portals with the financial data sitting in your accounting system — without replacing any of them.
Three modules, used independently or together:
- Carrier Reconciliation — Match rate cards, invoices, weights, SKUs, and addresses to surface overcharges, surcharge errors, and dimensional weight discrepancies in real time.
- Dispute Management — File disputes with auto-compiled evidence to recover overcharges, and pull full billing history for any customer to resolve questions on the spot.
- Billing Management — purpose-built for 3PL complexity. Pull operational data across customers, services, and carriers, apply the right charges, generate invoices, and sync to your accounting system. No re-keying.
Save time, recover real revenue, and finally get ops and finance working from the same data. Get started today!