Bulk freight
Hopper bottom factoring
Grain, fertilizer, and feed move on a calendar nobody controls. Get paid the same day on loads in by 11 AM CST instead of waiting on an elevator's accounting cycle.
Hopper bottom volume is seasonal by definition. A minimum volume requirement charges you in February for the fact that the crop is not in the ground yet. There is no minimum here, so a slow month costs you nothing and harvest does not have to be pre-committed to anyone.
The cash cycle
Why hopper bottom freight waits.
Hopper bottom work is the freight this company was built around, and its cash cycle has a shape nothing else in trucking has. Harvest compresses a year of hauling into a few weeks: you run every legal hour you have, burn through fuel at a rate that has nothing to do with your normal month, and generate more invoices in October than you did in the previous quarter. Then you wait, because the elevator that took your grain runs payables on a schedule that was not designed around your fuel card.
The mismatch is the whole problem. Your costs peak exactly when your receivables balloon, and the money to cover them is sitting in invoices that are perfectly good and thirty days out. Factoring closes that gap without a line of credit, without a personal guarantee against your house, and without asking you to predict in January how many loads you will run in October.
The paperwork is a real difference too. A hopper bottom load is not funded off a bill of lading alone: the scale tickets are the load. Weigh in, weigh out, and the settlement is built from the difference. We fund against that documentation because it is the paperwork this company was built on, and we do not treat a scale ticket as an exception that has to go to a supervisor.
What rides in it
- Corn, soybeans, wheat, and milo
- DDGs and processed feed ingredients
- Dry fertilizer and soil amendments
- Seed and grain byproducts
- Salt, sand, and other dry aggregates
Who pays the invoice
Grain elevators, co-ops, feed mills, ethanol plants, fertilizer dealers, and the ag brokers who cover for them.
This is what actually gets underwritten. Approval depends on your customer’s credit, not on your operating history.
Hauling grain? See grain hauling factoringPaperwork
What to send with the load.
Send all the paperwork related to the load. What that includes depends on the customer; these are the most common. Upload it all to the Smart Freight Portal.
Rate confirmation
The agreement with the broker or shipper, showing the load and the agreed rate.
Scale tickets
The weights, on any load that is weighed or paid by weight.
Bill of lading
Signed at delivery. It is the proof the load moved.
Not sure what a customer needs? Call and ask before you haul it.
How it works
Haul it, send it, get paid.
- 01Monday, 9:40 AM
Haul the load
Book it wherever you book freight. You choose which customers you factor, customer by customer. Nothing obligates you to send us all of them.
- 02Monday, 10:15 AM
Send the paperwork
Upload all the paperwork for the load to the Smart Freight Portal: usually the rate confirmation, scale tickets and bill of lading.
- 03Monday afternoon
Get paid the same day
Loads submitted by 11 AM CST, Monday through Friday, are paid the same day. Loads submitted after 11 AM are paid the next business day. The money lands in your bank by ACH.
Questions
Hopper bottom factoring, answered.
Can I factor a grain load that is paid on scale weights?
Yes. Send the scale tickets with the rate confirmation and the bill of lading. Ag settlements built from weigh-in and weigh-out tickets are the freight this company started with, so they are routine here rather than an exception that has to be escalated.
Do I have to factor all of my customers during harvest?
No. You choose which customers you factor, customer by customer. Once you factor a customer, all of their loads come to us until you ask for an NOA release. Your volume can swing as hard as harvest does: there is no minimum or monthly commitment that penalizes a quiet off season.
Get your hopper bottom invoices paid the same day.
The application takes a few minutes and commits you to nothing. No contract, no minimum, no monthly commitment.