We Have 226 Automatic Fees. Here is Why That Matters

Why accurate fee calculation, not configuration, is where revenue is won or lost across commercial finance.

By Chris Coleman, CODIX

Most software can place a fee. Far fewer can calculate and post one correctly when the numbers move every day.

Ask anyone who runs a factoring or asset-based lending book how many fee types they charge. It is never a short list. Discount charges on funds in use. Minimum fees across the ledger. Service fees, audit and field exam fees, non-utilisation fees on the undrawn line, reserve and overadvance fees, and a long tail that exists because a client needed one once.

We have 226 of them in iMX, pre-built and automatic, across factoring, asset-based lending, supply chain finance, debt collection and leasing. This may sound like a boast. It is not the point.

The point is what happens once the fee is live. Most software can place a fee. Far fewer can calculate it correctly when inputs move daily and post it cleanly, so the books are tied out at month end. That gap is where income quietly goes uncaptured, where audits turn painful, and where platforms fall short, often without the buyer spotting it in the demo.

In our world, a fee is rarely a flat number.

In asset-based lending and receivables finance, most fees are calculated off a base that moves daily. A discount depends on how many days each invoice has been outstanding. A minimum fee depends on the shortfall across the ledger. A non-utilisation fee depends on the average unused line. Advances go out, collections come in, invoices age, availability shifts, and the fee must recalculate off the right number every time.

Take a tiered discount charge: 1.5 percent for the first 30 days, another half point every 10 days after. Multiply that across a ledger of invoices, each at a different age, recalculating daily, and you see how a spreadsheet or a shallow fee engine starts to drift. Not through error or intent, but through the mechanical difficulty of charging the right amount on the right base on the right day.

iMX organises fees the way the master agreement is laid out, from factoring charges and facility administration through funding, utilisation and commitment to dispute and legal. Manual charges, a field visit, an appraisal, a one-off waiver, can be configured as well. But the library is the easy part. What matters is what comes next.

The fee must land properly: the right entry to the general ledger, a clean trail back to the event that created it, and a sub-ledger that ties out when the auditor or the client asks. That traceability is what matters most. When every fee links back to its source, the books are clear, queries are quick to answer, and anything that needs checking can be verified precisely.

This is the part buyers often forget to test

Fee setup looks solved. Every platform shows a screen to configure fees and rates, and in a demo one fee looks like any other. The depth only shows up later, when a tiered charge recalculates because an invoice aged overnight, when a minimum fee shortfall is assessed at month end, or when a client queries a charge and expects a clear breakdown.

The industry sells fee configuration. It rarely tests whether the fee is calculated on the right base and posted correctly. That tells you where the effort has gone, and where it has not.

The income nobody measures

Lost fee income is real, and larger than most expect. There is no figure specific to factoring or asset-based lending, so we look at adjacent sectors. The Boston Consulting Group found that as much as 15 percent of revenue in corporate banking is never captured, fees that exist in agreements but are never charged.

A comparable case from Genpact describes a commercial finance firm missing 25 million dollars annually due to miscalculated or waived fees without proper control. These are proxies, not exact industry figures, but the underlying causes, manual setup and the drift between contract and system, are even more pronounced in markets where values move daily.

Fees as a design tool, not an afterthought

Get this right and fees stop being operational detail and start becoming strategy. If you can deploy and calculate complex fee structures without relying on development cycles, you design the product around pricing rather than adding it at the end. Tiered charges, minimums, non-utilisation fees, milestone pricing, all become deliberate levers shaping both revenue and client behaviour.

Pricing is the most powerful profit lever a lender has, ahead of volume growth. Yet many lenders leave fee structures unchanged for years. The opportunity is not new fees, it is using existing ones deliberately, pricing them correctly, and collecting them in full. That is what 226 pre-built fee types enable: new product, new market, new fee, already available, already calculated on the right base, and already posted correctly.

One engine, every product

Because iMX runs factoring, receivables finance, asset-based lending, supply chain finance and trade finance on a single platform and data model, the same fee engine applies across all products. A client with multiple exposures gets fees calculated and posted consistently, with a unified audit trail.

Every event, including every fee, is processed in real time and generates its accounting entry from the live position, fully traceable back to its source. The fee is not just placed. It is managed, validated, and accounted for.

Fee income is easy to underestimate because what slips through rarely appears as a visible number. The answer is not the assumption that nothing ever will. It is an engine that calculates from the live position and keeps every fee traceable, so the picture remains clear and any issue can be identified and corrected.

So, when we say 226, we are not counting features. We are pointing to where the real complexity, and the real value, of the system sits. It is not on the surface.

STOP INTEGRATING. START CONVERGING.

Sources

Boston Consulting Group, on uncaptured revenue and slippage in corporate bank pricing: americanbanker.com/opinion/the-seven-deadly-pricing-sins-of-corporate-banks

PYMNTS and Datos Insights, on bank billing shortfalls and pricing governance: pymnts.com/news/banking/2025/80-percent-of-banks-acknowledge-billing-shortfalls

FCI, global factoring turnover 2024: fci.nl/en/news