Carrier invoices

The base rate on a carrier invoice is usually right; the errors sit in the lines underneath it. Whichever rate the label carries, ours in France and the UK or your own contract anywhere else, the carrier gets that line right most of the time. Every parcel you ship leaves a label record in your account, with your declaration, the service, the destination and every scan the carrier wrote against it, and with that record open an invoice is mostly matching.

Surcharge conditions

A surcharge is a price for a condition, and the condition has to be true of the parcel in front of you. Fuel is the familiar one. The ones that catch brands out are a residential surcharge on a parcel that went to a shop, a remote-area charge on a city-centre address, and an address correction on an address that validated when the label was printed. Every family of surcharge is defined in the carrier terms you accepted, so the check never changes. The condition has to have been real for this parcel and the amount has to be the one in the terms, or the line goes back.

A parcel that came back because nobody was in costs the amount set in the carrier terms, and on our rates we pass that through at cost like any other transport line. Check that the failed delivery happened; the tracking scans show it.

Re-rates

Carriers bill on whichever is higher, the parcel's actual weight or the weight its outer dimensions imply. Every carrier works that second figure out under its own terms, and they differ, so we cannot give you one formula to check against. The re-rate is the line where the carrier's own measurement replaced yours and the price moved with it, usually a box that went through the depot bigger than the label said.

You declare the weight, the dimensions and the contents of the parcel, and accurate data is your responsibility under the contract. A re-rate on a parcel you under-declared is owed and should be paid. A re-rate on a parcel you declared correctly is the carrier's measurement error, and you dispute it with your declaration and your packaging preset as the evidence. The audit holds both numbers, declared and billed, and flags every parcel where the two part company.

Duplicates and rate errors

A duplicate is a tracking number billed twice, on the same invoice or across two of them, and it is the easiest money on the page to recover because the evidence is the invoice itself. Rate errors are harder to see: the service billed sits a tier above the one chosen at label time, or the zone is wrong for the postcode, or a contract rate was not applied, or a label you voided before pickup turns up billed anyway. They are easy to miss by eye on a long invoice. Each one reconciles against the label record, which holds the service and rate chosen at label time and the rule that chose them.

On our rates the comparison is direct, because shipping is rebilled at the carrier price with zero markup and we earn on the subscription, so the carrier's number and ours are the same number. On your own carrier accounts the same lines are read against your own contract.

Every line on a carrier invoice has to answer to a label you printed.

Declarations before dispatch

Your declaration before the parcel leaves decides whether a re-rate can be disputed later. Weigh and measure the packed box, not the product's catalogue size, and set a packaging preset by lane, product type and zone in your account so the declaration is identical on every parcel and a measurement that differs is the carrier's to explain. Declare the nature of the goods as shipped. Validate the full delivery address when the label is created, so the address-correction and re-delivery lines never exist. Then let the rule choose the service. Best-rate selection happens at label generation under a rule you set and supervise; you can see which rate won and why, and that is the line a rate error is checked against later.

The invoice audit

The invoice audit reads every carrier invoice line against the parcels shipped. It flags the lines that do not match and prices the recoverable amount, then prepares the dispute for your approval. The Auditor works inside limits you set and asks for review before a claim crosses your threshold, so nothing goes to a carrier with your name on it that you have not seen.

The evidence travels with the claim, because your account already holds the label, the declaration, the scans and the invoice line, and gathering that usually takes longer than writing the claim. On an Enterprise contract the audit runs on your live invoices from the first week with no change on your carrier side, and we import your historical invoices for the first audit.