Andrew, warehouse manager at EZDC, was spending four to eight hours every Sunday auditing invoices — combing through each one line by line, comparing charges against weekly transactions, trying to explain to customers what they'd been billed for. It wasn't a great way to spend a Sunday. And it wasn't a sustainable way to run a billing operation.
After implementing Rails, that same process now takes 30 minutes. Andrew can spot a discrepancy, check in on a client's charges mid-week, and send invoices clients can actually understand without losing the weekend; Rails gives his client base unparalleled transparency.
EZDC: a warehouse operation built from the ground up
EZDC runs two facilities in Kentucky: one in Smiths Grove and another about 20 minutes south in Bowling Green. Like many 3PLs, they started small. A few people in a garage, figuring it out. As the customer base grew and the billing complexity grew with it, the systems they'd been relying on started to show their limits.
Andrew wears a lot of hats. He manages day-to-day warehouse operations, pick and pack, employment, billing profile setup, charge configuration — essentially everything short of clicking send on the final invoice. Andrew keeps the wheels turning at the facilities.
EZDC runs weekly billing cycles. For Andrew, that meant one day each week billing took over.
The problem: WMS's billing couldn't keep up
When EZDC started, they used their WMS as their billing platform. Andrew noticed the cracks early. There were duplicate charges, charges that wouldn't capture correctly, invoices that wouldn't flow through to QuickBooks. He tried to work around it: adjusting profiles, building workarounds, just making it function well enough.
But as EZDC grew and took on more customers with more complex, individualized pricing, the band-aids stopped holding. What had been a manageable frustration became a real problem. Every billing week meant every invoice had to be manually cross-checked against the week's transactions, one at a time, to make sure everything reconciled correctly.
"We were putting in four to eight hours on a Sunday trying to audit all of these invoices, figure out why are these charges not working? What's the difference here."
— Andrew, Warehouse Manager, EZDCOn top of the internal burden, there was a customer experience problem. Invoices went out as raw CSV files — data dumps that required clients to know how to filter and read the information themselves. There was no portal. No analytics. No visibility into cost per shipment, order volume, or trends. Clients who wanted to understand what they were paying for had to do their own data archaeology.
Why Rails
EZDC found Rails the way most 3PLs do: word of mouth. Dave, the owner, attends industry conventions and spends time with other 3PL owners. Rails kept coming up. When people were talking about billing challenges — and there were plenty of people with the same challenges — Rails was consistently the answer they'd landed on.
EZDC briefly evaluated one other platform before choosing Rails. It didn't last long. The interface wasn't intuitive, and it was still leaning on raw data presentation rather than solving the problem the raw data created. It was an immediate no.
Onboarding: thorough, but worth it
When EZDC migrated their billing profiles over, the differences surfaced immediately and what surfaced wasn't just migration friction. It was a clear picture of everything that had been wrong in their WMS billing engine all along.
Some charges the WMS simply couldn't capture. Others had been tracked through workarounds that didn't translate. The migration required significant rebuilding, not just porting. Andrew worked with the Rails team through tweaks and changes until the billing setup was where it needed to be.
"When it pulled into Rails, we could immediately see why we were having issues, where we were having them. Some charges [the WMS] just couldn't do. It didn't have a way to track them."
— Andrew, Warehouse Manager, EZDCWhat changed: time, transparency, and visibility into the business
The most immediate change was time. Invoice auditing went from a 4–8 hour Sunday commitment to roughly 30 minutes. Now Andrew can track pricing throughout the week — if something looks off mid-cycle, he can check it then rather than waiting for Sunday. If the numbers are tracking evenly across a month, he knows the billing is running as intended. The process shifted from reactive to ambient.
Customer transparency changed completely. Instead of a CSV full of raw data, clients now have a clear, readable view of what they're being charged for. They can see cost per shipment, track what's happening over time, and actually understand their invoice without needing to call in to ask questions. For a company that relies on retention, that visibility matters.
But the shift Andrew talks about most is what Rails revealed about the business itself. Ad hoc charges — the manual, one-off billing for extra work — had always been tracked through the WMS, but finding them meant digging into each customer account individually. Rails consolidated all of that in one place.
"Rails does a really good job of making a home for all of those charges in one central location. At the end of the week I can go through and see which clients are racking up ad hoc charges, what they're for, how much, how frequent."
— Andrew, Warehouse Manager, EZDCThat visibility changed how EZDC thinks about account profitability. An account that generates strong revenue on paper isn't necessarily a good account if it's also generating a constant stream of ad hoc charges that require manual intervention. The account that bills a little less but runs cleanly through the standard workflows may actually be worth more. Rails made that comparison possible.
Strategy: moving from manual to automated billing
The ad hoc charge transparency has kicked off a broader strategic shift. EZDC is now working to move away from manual ad hoc billing entirely — replacing it with automated charges that fire when the work is done, rather than requiring someone to remember the work and manually enter it into the system.
The goal is a billing operation where the system does the tracking, not the employee. When work happens, the charge happens. No dependency on memory, no risk of forgetting a charge from Tuesday by the time Sunday rolls around.
What's next: AI analytics and financial health by client
Andrew is most excited about what's coming on the Rails roadmap — specifically, AI-powered analytics designed to give 3PLs a financial health view of each account. Not just revenue, but where that revenue is actually coming from: whether profit is driven by storage, by shipping, by other services, and whether the labor cost required to service that account changes the picture.
The goal is to be able to look at any client and answer the question: is this actually a good account for our business? Once those tools are live, Rails becomes something more than a billing platform. It becomes the financial operating layer for understanding the business.
The bottom line
For 3PLs still running on a WMS's native billing or doing it manually, Andrew's advice is direct:
"Look at Rails today. Schedule a call."
— Andrew, Warehouse Manager, EZDCIt's a clear directive from someone who spent too many Sundays auditing invoices line by line and found a better way.
