Tips on Shipping & Freight Invoice Auditing

Most small/mid-sized businesses shipping parcel and freight are not auditing their invoices. And if they are auditing, it is often a manual process on spreadsheets that is highly inefficient.

We find that effective auditing of your shipping and freight invoices can get you as much as 15% back in refunds. And with the right software, it does not have to be a complicated or time-consuming task.

Businesses that ship typically fall into three categories:

• Hear No Evil - The business is not auditing shipping invoices due to low staff and/or a misunderstanding of how much money they could get back from carriers. 
  
  
• See No Evil - One staff member is responsible for auditing but attempts to manage the enormity of the task with manual processes and spreadsheets, which is fraught with inefficiencies and inaccuracies. This is a non-standardized process that is in jeopardy if the staff member leaves. 
   
• Speak No Evil - The business outsources auditing to a third-party, however, these auditors do not tell the full story. They do not audit down to accessorial or line item charges comparing what was quoted. 

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What Shipping Auditors Look For

Every shipping auditor in the industry focuses on service level compliance, meaning they target whether or not a carrier delivered within the delivery-day time frame agreed to in the quote. If the carrier did not, that is a breach of the agreement and the shipper is owed money. 

Typically 5-10% of deals aren't meeting delivery requirements. That's money down the drain making auditing well worth the effort to track these discrepancies. However, auditors do not have visibility from quote to invoice. Auditors do not see the fuel, residential, and all the broken-out line item charges. 

Because auditors do not have a system that customers are shipping through, they miss capturing those line item accessorial charges. FreightPOP’s shipping software captures this data. On average, our customers get back 15% of shipping and freight spend in partial refunds.

We hit pricing and service compliance in our shipping invoice audits.

Invoice Auditing Tools

Skip the auditor. You can easily audit invoices with the tools we provide.

With our shipping software, you can quickly examine invoices for:  

• Rating errors
• Duplicate charges
• Incorrect weight 
• Incorrect accessorial fees
• Errors on freight classifications 

As carrier invoices come in, what was quoted vs. what was charged can be evaluated. If you ship with a carrier that guarantees one day or two-three day delivery, FreightPOP gives you the tool to readily catch overcharges on shipments that did not meet that delivery time-frame.

For example, one of our customers who had an invoice for $8,200 that covered 508 different shipments, isolated that 50 failed to be delivered on time. This customer was able to go to the carrier and apply for an $800 refund. Identifying overcharges such as this is not all our system can do.

To request a demonstration of what we can do for your business, just sign up below.