Parcel Audit Services

Parcel Audit Services

Shipping parcels has become increasingly expensive, with rising fuel costs, supply chain issues, and carriers increasing their rates steeply year after year. At the beginning of 2023, most U.S. parcel carriers have instituted a 6.9% general rate hike, higher than the 4.9% and 5.9% increases many put into effect in 2021 and 2022. If you factor in UPS and FedEx’s adjustments to their surcharges, like fuel or oversized package handling, the overall increase approaches 10%.

While these rates impact your bottom line negatively, there is good news. Conducting a parcel invoice audit regularly can help you recover some of your spend, catching the errors and extra charges that cost a great deal of money. In this guide, we’ll go over what a parcel audit is, the benefits, and how parcel audit services like ShipSigma can save you money without changing or disrupting your workflows.

What Is a Parcel Audit?

A parcel audit, also known as a parcel invoice audit, is a process of going through your shipping bills and invoices to identify billing errors. A small parcel audit will assist in figuring out when, where, and how you are being overcharged. A few of the common issues that crop up during this process are:

• Late delivery - a study from March of 2019 found that more than 6% of UPS and FedEx parcels were delayed, nearly 72% of them by a full day.
• Non-shipments - packages that were scanned into the carrier’s system but never made it onto a shipping vehicle.
• Lost or damaged packages - more than 1.7 million packages are lost every day, with one in 10 arriving damaged.
• Duplicate charges - when you are billed for the same package more than once.
• Unnecessary address correction - when you are charged for small address changes that are not significant.
• Fuel surcharge errors - a fee that is meant to cover the changing price of fuel, there can often be issues with the correct rate on your invoice.
• Incorrect dimensional weight charges - when the carrier measures the package incorrectly or applies an incorrect dimensional divisor.
• Missing or invalid Proof-of-Delivery - this paperwork is important to make sure that your parcels were delivered correctly.
• Incorrect rates and missing discounts - make sure that your agreed upon rates and discounts are reflected accurately.
• Phantom accessorial charges - additional fees and charges that aren’t valid.

Mistakes and errors on invoices add up quickly, and carriers have refund policies as part of their normal business practices. In fact, it is part of the carrier’s responsibility to ensure that parcels are delivered in a timely manner according to the details spelled out in your contract. Identifying mistakes gives the carrier an opportunity to improve their process to prevent future issues.

What Are the Benefits of Small Parcel Audits?

Auditing your parcels may feel like it takes a lot of time and effort, especially since once you have issues figured out, you still have to write an explanation, request refunds, and follow up to make sure your account receives the proper credits. When shipping thousands of parcels a month, you may be asking yourself, “why should I audit my invoices?”

First and foremost, you will save money. Average savings can vary by business and the volume of shipping you’re doing, but here at ShipSigma, our customers 2-7% savings from our auditing processes and see up to 30% in annual savings with our full service. The money that you will save is significant—even a 2% reduction of shipping costs can make an enormous difference. The insights that are surfaced by conducting a parcel audit can be surprising. For example, one of our customers was shipping their parcels using an express service. After digging through their data, we noticed that the shipping times weren’t really improved—they could ship 60% of their packages via ground and still have their parcels arrive on the same day. Making this simple switch significantly decreased spend and increased efficiencies for our customer.

Another benefit to auditing invoices is that you will gain insights into carrier performance and your overall network efficiency. This data can help you optimize your shipping operations and give your logistics managers the analytics they need to make informed decisions.

What Are Parcel Audit Services?

Parcel audit services, sometimes called parcel consulting, is when you hire an external company to conduct your parcel auditing on your behalf. Parcel consultants often have deep knowledge of the shipping industry, as well as innovative technology that assist in the process. At ShipSigma, our founders spent decades working for carriers like UPS and FedEx. This has given us first hand experience into how these companies think and operate. We also empower our customers by providing long-term cost efficiencies through data and technology.

What is Audit in Shipping?

What is Audit in Shipping? Audit in shipping refers to the systematic review and verification of shipping records and transactions to ensure accuracy, compliance with contractual agreements, and the optimization of shipping procedures. Audits are crucial in identifying discrepancies, operational inefficiencies, and opportunities for cost savings in the logistics and supply chain sector.

Types of Shipping Audits

Shipping audits can be classified into several types, including:

• Freight Bill Audit: This audit focuses on checking freight bills for accuracy in classification, weight, and applied tariffs. It ensures that the billed charges comply with the negotiated carrier contracts.
• Contract Compliance Audit: This type of audit verifies that all terms agreed upon in transportation contracts are being adhered to by all parties involved. It checks for compliance in areas such as service levels, pricing, and surcharge application.
• Operational Audit: Conducted internally or externally, this audit evaluates the operational aspects of shipping processes. It aims to improve efficiency and streamline operations by identifying bottlenecks and suggesting improvements.

Benefits of Shipping Audits

Shipping audits offer numerous benefits, including:

• Cost Savings: Identifying billing errors, unapplied discounts, and unwarranted surcharges can lead to significant cost reductions.
• Enhanced Operational Efficiency: Audits can pinpoint inefficiencies and procedural errors that, once addressed, optimize the shipping process.
• Risk Reduction: By ensuring compliance with regulatory standards and contractual terms, audits minimize the risk of financial penalties and reputational damage.
• Improved Carrier Performance: Regular audits keep carriers accountable, enhancing service quality and reliability.

In conclusion, audits in shipping are an essential element for financial oversight and operational integrity in the logistics and supply chain industry. Implementing regular and thorough audits not only prevents revenue loss but also drives continuous improvement and compliance in the shipping processes.

How Do Parcel Audit Services Work?

At ShipSigma, our parcel audit services start working for you immediately. It’s free to start, and we share the recovered funds. In fact, if we can’t successfully recover your money, we won’t charge you. And, you’ll enjoy all the reporting features that come along with our service at no cost.

Five Minutes From Now:

As soon as you sign up for our parcel audit, we immediately start recovering around 1-5% of your total shipping spend. We look for carriers’ billing errors, service failures, and other simple mistakes. This audit process looks back over a span of about 2 weeks and recovers any erroneous charges that may have already been paid, and then continues working in the background to run this process continuously.

Two Weeks After Signing Up:

After two weeks we provide a complementary performance analysis. This review is where we will discuss our findings, and it is a perfect opportunity for re-evaluating your needs with our executive team. If we identify any opportunity for savings, we’ll highlight it and present you with a solution. During this step of the process, we often find 20-30% overall cost savings opportunities. Best of all, the solutions we offer typically require zero change in your day-to-day operations.

One Month After Analysis

Within a month, you’ll start seeing meaningful results from our more impactful services, such as our Parcel Rate Reduction. You’ll have access to detailed reports down to the tracking-number level, and have the ability to see exactly how we saved your money. Remember—we only get paid if we deliver measurable and successful cost reductions.

Going Forward

As your business evolves, we move forward with you. We can help you forecast distribution costs, mitigate rate increases, or help you avoid unnecessary fees. We’ll help you avoid costs, saving you money today and tomorrow because we’re passionate about helping businesses with end-to-end supply chain improvements.

Our services include:

• Live Shipment Audit - Looking at shipments in real-time, issues like instant rate changes, re-weighs, and re-classes are flagged, and we get to work immediately to reconcile the discrepancy.
• Operational Support - We act as an extension of your team, providing you and your carriers with our deep industry knowledge to assist with booking loads and day-to-day operational questions.
• Dedicated Team - We are dedicated to your success, and you will have a designated team of professionals assigned to your account to help with your parcel spend.
• Track and Trace Shipments - We review shipments daily and work with your carrier on any late shipments, providing up-to-date information in the TMS.
• Carrier Payments - Rather than being inundated with a multitude of invoices, our Recon software system sends a consolidated invoice each week. We pay carriers on your behalf, so you only have to send one payment to Recon, or we can provide vouchers if it is preferred.

What Is Parcel Software?

Parcel audit software is advanced technology that allows you to gather the data about your invoices and analyze it. There are different types of software with varying levels of complexity. Some parcel audit software takes a great deal of time and effort to set up and integrate into your workflow, as well as adding additional steps of data entry.

At ShipSigma, our Audit & Reporting platform is a simple, intuitive piece of technology that doesn’t interrupt your workflow. In fact, it automatically identifies all invalid charges (around 1-5% of all charges), putting money back into your pocket. It takes about five minutes to sign up, and, even if you only look at it once, it will continue working in the background to recover your money.

Why Outsource Small Parcel Audits?

Simple: because it saves you money, time, and effort. Manual auditing processes are far too inefficient and time consuming to be worthwhile. Purchasing parcel audit software can be a good option, but without the knowhow, it can end up just as time consuming as a manual process with data entry and integration issues. In-house auditing can take a massive investment of employee time to find the errors and file claims, potentially running into issues with meeting carrier time limits and missing the window to file a request for reimbursement.

A parcel consulting partner like ShipSigma already has the automated technology and the data processing experience to take your carrier invoices and turn them into manageable reports full of actionable data insights. You can better understand where your money is actually going while simultaneously experiencing significant savings. We’ll handle the whole parcel invoice audit process. We will audit the thousands of line items on your invoices, file for claims and refunds on your behalf, and make sure that the credit is applied correctly in the future. You don’t have to get in the weeds with a parcel audit, saving your time and energy for creating your product and selling to your customers.

Save Money on Your Shipping Spend with ShipSigma

Our mission is simple, we’re here to save you money. Through our parcel auditing software and services our customers routinely save 2-7% on their shipping spend. In addition to these services, we can help you leverage your shipping data during contract negotiations, saving our customers 20-30% on their spend. Backed by AI-driven technology that allows you to see live market data, you’ll gain detailed and specialized insight into your specific shipping costs, giving you the upper hand when it’s time to sit down at the table.

It only takes a minute to get started with ShipSigma, and you’ll immediately start identifying and collecting refunds with our parcel auditing process. Getting started is free, and you won’t pay us unless we recover money on your behalf. Ready to start saving? Connect with us today.