Your software never checks the carrier invoice

There is a folder in your accounting system with hundreds of carrier invoices in it. Every one was approved. Not one was read. Here is the check, and the arithmetic, so you can run it without us.

There is a folder in your accounting system with 400 carrier invoices in it. Every one of them was approved. Not one of them was read.

That is not a criticism of whoever approves them. They are doing the job exactly as it is written. The invoice arrives as a PDF, they check the total against the purchase order, they approve it. There are 30 line items sitting under that total and 399 more invoices to get through this month.

Nobody reads the lines. Nobody can. And no software reads them either, because the system that knows what you shipped and the system that knows what you paid have never been introduced to each other.

So the money goes out. Every month. For years.

Each side holds half the answer. The comparison that would find the money is nobody's job and nobody's software.

Here is the check. An afternoon, and it costs you nothing.

What you need

90 days of carrier invoices. The rate agreement you signed. Your own shipment records with dates.

That is the whole kit. If you can export the invoices to CSV, a spreadsheet does the rest. If you cannot export them, stop there, because you have already found something worth fixing.

4 things to look for

You paid full price for late deliveries. Your contract has a service guarantee in it. When a shipment misses, that charge comes back to you. But only if somebody asks, and only inside the claim window, and the claim window is short on purpose. Look up the number of days in your carrier’s current tariff. Not the one you remember. That number has moved.

Charges that stopped being true years ago. Residential delivery. Liftgate. Inside delivery. Address correction. Somebody ticked those boxes at pickup once, and nothing unticks them. Your customer moved out of a house and into a warehouse in 2023. You are still paying the residential surcharge on every delivery, because the flag sits in a field nobody has opened since.

You are paying to ship air. The carrier bills the greater of actual weight and dimensional weight. If your box sizes were chosen before the last divisor change, every unit of that item carries a penalty, on every order, forever. This is the one that compounds. It is usually the biggest number on the page.

The same charge, twice. One order goes out on 2 trailers and some systems raise 2 base charges. Boring. And real.

Do the arithmetic out loud

The companies that sell parcel audits publish recoverable error at 3% to 7% of spend. They also sell the fix, so hold that range at arm’s length. Real recovery, once you strip out everything that fell outside the claim window, runs closer to 1.5% to 3%.

Take the bottom. Always take the bottom. The bottom is the number you can say to your own CFO without a footnote.

$400,000 a year in freight. 1.5%. That is $6,000.

One category, on the most cautious assumption available. And it does not happen once, because the flags and the box sizes stay fixed after you fix them.

When you should not hire us

Is freight the only thing wrong with your business? Then don’t hire us. Call a parcel audit company. They work on contingency, they take 30% to 50% of what they find, and if that is genuinely your only problem then it is a fair trade and you should take it.

They differ on one row. That row is the whole reason we charge a flat fee instead of a percentage.

Now here is the row a contingency firm cannot reach.

Your office types the same job into 3 systems, 11 hours a week. Nobody takes a percentage of that. There is no bill to take a percentage of. Every incentive in that market points at an invoice, so the waste that sits in the gaps between your systems is invisible to every firm that gets paid on savings.

It has been invisible for years. That is why it is still there.

What we do

$2,500. Flat.

3 weeks inside the software you already pay for and the way work moves between your systems. We come out of software and operations, not accounting. We are not reading your books. We are reading what your systems do, and what they never do for each other.

You get a list. Every line has a dollar figure on it and enough detail that you can act without us in the room.

Find less than $7,500 a year and you pay nothing, and you keep the list.

Start with the carrier invoices this week. If the check comes back clean, you have learned something true about your own operation, and it cost you one afternoon.