The trucking company I work for assigns me to watch training videos. The narrator on one of the training videos says the following: "Many of our customers support automated billing but some customers, specifically brokerages, require a physical copy of your bills to ensure that payment is received." What is a brokerage?
Oh my. Think of it like this a brokerage is a company that coordinates and schedules shipments for a company using various carriers.
A freight broker is like the real estate agent when buying selling homes, someone between the seller and the buyer of the home. The broker/agent doesn't own any freight. They have been hired by the owner to find a buyer/trucking company to move the home/freight. Typically, as I understand it, the freight shipper/owner pays the broker an amount of money to have the freight moved from Shipper to Receiver. The broker then posts that load on a load board for some amount of money. If the broker can find a trucking company to haul that freight for less than the Shipper paid them to have it moved the broker makes a profit.
The place where a shipper pays a broker $5/mi to move the freight and the broker tells the trucker he will pay $1/mi because that's all i got in it.
