As much as 11% of freight loads arrive damaged. The costs of these damages add up when you consider product replacement, customer service hours, and lost loyalty. And, that’s only one of the overlooked costs that shippers face. Late deliveries, duplicate charges, incorrect weights, and lost shipments all add up and undercut your bottom line.
You negotiated your contract with your carrier to achieve a certain price point, but now it’s costing more than that to conduct business. So, what can be done? Tracking down each error that’s inflating your shipping costs can bog down your team and detract from other areas of your business. Still, that’s a lot of money to just let slip away.
Conducting an audit is often the best way to identify and remedy errors in your payments. Here’s how an external freight or parcel invoice audit can save you money without burdening your team.
Freight and parcel audits provide an extensive overview of your carrier’s invoices. The main goal of freight audits is to identify incidents where you were overcharged due to service failures and errors in the shipping process.
In theory, these audits aren’t that different from a tax audit; you compare what was owed to what was actually paid and root out the causes of any discrepancies. Unlike your taxes, though, you can look forward to a freight audit because instead of owing the government more money, you’ll be saving the money that you were guaranteed in your carrier’s contract.
Freight post audits occur after you have made a payment to your carrier. To start an audit, you need data. Typically, you would gather shipment and payment records from the past 1-5 years. Keeping a regularly updated database makes it easier when you want to conduct an audit. Once you have your data ready, your auditor will search for errors in your charges, refunds, and credits.
At ShipSigma, our data-obsessed team of external auditors uses proprietary software to analyze late deliveries, lost or damaged shipments, incorrect charges, duplicate charges, incorrect address corrections, faulty dimensional weight charges, and incorrect carrier rates every single week.
When it comes to making sure your process is error-free, you have options.
A manual audit is conducted by an internal team member. This method can seem attractive and like a way to quickly get the job done at a low cost. However, manual audits can weigh down team members and drag out the process. You also face an increased risk of human error, resulting in missed opportunities for savings.
Freight audit software reduces the risk of human error by keeping your payments, invoices, and other data sorted. You can also integrate audit software with your workflow, making it easier to synchronize your activity with expected costs.
The price is usually worth it to upgrade from manual audits, but you still have to devote hours to entering information and analyzing the data.
Working with a third-party service provider takes the advantages of freight auditing software several steps forward. With a freight and logistics consulting partner like ShipSigma, you can automate your freight audit process.
Our auditing technology provides an extensive review of your invoices, eliminating the risk of human error. The result–insights that you can trust to save you money.
You also don’t have to worry about sorting through a pile of insights. We can do that for you, too. We also keep track of live freight data, so our weekly and monthly reports have the most up-to-date recommendations.
The primary importance of a freight audit is to save you money by getting refunds from your carrier for incorrect charges or incomplete services.
Regular freight audits are necessary to prevent ongoing losses. The shipping process is full of complex logistics, so it doesn’t even take a bad actor to unintentionally inflate costs.
Eliminate the risk of human error with our completely electronic, automated freight and parcel invoice audit technology. How do we do it? Our AI-driven technology uses live market data in combination with your payment and invoice data to ensure you’re only paying for what you get–nothing more. You don’t have to wait around for results, either. You’ll see meaningful results from our auditing service within a month.
You negotiated a great deal with your carrier, now let us hold them to it. Contact us to try it for free.