Barq Express: Ending cash reconciliation chaos for a platform running 8,000 daily deliveries
The last-mile platform grew from 700 to 8,000 daily shipments in two years while customer collections were still reconciled manually on couriers' spreadsheets — shortfalls surfacing days later with no way to trace them. We deployed Avanta logistics with a full shipment lifecycle, daily-closing courier wallets, a merchant portal, and automated billing.
8,000
Daily shipments with live movement posting
9×
Faster daily cash reconciliation closing
31%
Reduction in tracking and collection complaints
Background
Barq Express launched as a fast-delivery startup in major cities, focusing from day one on e-commerce merchants with cash-on-delivery collection deposited to stores within set windows. The company outgrew its planners' ambitions: from 700 daily shipments to eight thousand within two years, through a fleet of contracted couriers collecting cash and depositing it via electronic wallets. Its reconciliation systems never grew at the same pace, still relying on spreadsheets that area supervisors filled every evening.
The challenge
Reconciling each courier was a manual chore: comparing collected versus expected amounts on a spreadsheet the area supervisor filled, where small variances later coalesced into large shortfalls discovered two weeks on — with no trace of their cause left. Complaints rose from both sides: merchants demanding accurate delivery reports and their money on time, couriers inheriting the load of manual-entry mistakes. Monthly merchant billing went out late and sometimes with wrong shipment counts, opening disputes that delayed collection from the most important partner in the entire business model.
The solution
We built the complete shipment lifecycle inside Avanta: from merchant pickup request, through courier assignment, delivered / refused / held states, to amount handover or shipment return, with live posting of every state change. Each courier received an electronic wallet crediting collections the moment they're handed in, closing daily with automatic matching between collected, deposited, and deductible amounts — no variance crosses its day without a recorded cause. A merchant portal shows every store its shipments, states, and receivables live, while merchant billing is automated from actually delivered shipments with zero manual input.
Implementation
The rollout took eleven weeks. The first four modeled every shipment state and synchronized the system with the field courier app, verifying that every in-app tap generates a system entry instantly. A three-week pilot then ran in two adjacent districts, closing couriers' wallets daily in parallel with supervisors' manual sheets until everyone trusted the matching. The final four weeks generalized to all regions, trained supervisors to read the daily variance dashboard instead of building it themselves, and launched the merchant portal with our largest merchants migrated progressively.
The outcome
Cash reconciliation transformed from a struggling weekly chore into a daily close completed within one hour of operations ending — a nine-fold speedup — and any shortfall became an exception with a recorded cause surfaced in hours, not days. Merchant complaints about tracking and collection fell 31% in the first quarter after the portal launched, because stores could now see their own shipments before asking. Monthly billing went out automatically on the first business day, ending shipment-count disputes that once consumed whole meetings, while faster, more accurate collection improved the venture's cash flow overall.
Lasting impact
New contract offers are now built on actual per-region, per-service delivery costs, making pricing a known-impact decision rather than a guess. The company expanded to a new city within weeks once operations became repeatable: same lifecycle, same wallets, same dashboard — with no additional finance team. Major merchants now treat the Barq portal as a daily tool inside their own warehouses, raising any competitor's switching cost and cementing the platform's standing as a partner, not merely a carrier.
Next step
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