3Portals Cuts Month-End Close Time by 70% with Swiper

THE COMPANY

A logistics network running on spreadsheets

3Portals moves freight for more than 400 mid-market shippers across North America, invoicing and reconciling payments across dozens of carrier and customer accounts every week. Its finance team of twelve had grown the close process by hand, one spreadsheet at a time, for almost a decade.

THE CHALLENGE

A two-week close that kept getting longer

Every month-end, the team spent up to two weeks manually matching bank transactions against the ledger, chasing discrepancies over email, and re-running the same reconciliation spreadsheets carrier by carrier. The close routinely bled into the first week of the next month, delaying reporting and forecasting.

We were always closing last month’s books while this month was already half over. It made everything downstream, forecasting, board reporting, feel like it was running behind.
Maya Chen, VP of Finance

THE SOLUTION

Reconciliation that runs continuously, not once a month

Swiper matches transactions against 3Portals’s ledger as they happen, instead of batching everything into a single end-of-month push. Discrepancies surface immediately with the underlying transaction attached, so exceptions get resolved in minutes instead of being rediscovered weeks later.

The finance team configured automatic matching rules for its highest-volume carrier accounts in the first two weeks, then rolled the same rules out across its full carrier network within a quarter.

THE RESULTS

A close measured in days, not weeks

3Portals’s close now finishes in under three business days, freeing up roughly three weeks of finance capacity every quarter for forecasting and vendor negotiations rather than data entry.