Properly recording Freight out expenses.

Our manufacturing company is fairly new(3 years). I recently came on board to assist with cleaning up their basic processes. Currently they are holding their month end close to try and capture as many AP invoices as possible. One example of this is freight out invoices. The problem I am seeing is that the freight invoice has an August invoice date but it is for July shipments. They are e tearing this invoice in AP and then doing a journal entry to book the expense to July. Is this the proper way? At my last company, AP invoices were processed by invoice date, and that invoice date reflected the period the expense was incurred.