Freight Cost & Carrier Management · Canada & USA
Choosing carriers, checking their invoices and managing your freight spend as one programme, delivered as part of our broader managed logistics solutions. Roughly one in twelve freight invoices carries an error across the industry, and almost all of them favour the carrier.
Checked Before It Is Paid
not queried months afterwards
5 to 8%
Industry freight invoice error rate
180 Days
Window to claim an overcharge
Every Invoice
Checked against your agreed rate
One Bill
Instead of many carrier invoices
The Basics, Simply
Freight management is running your shipping as one organised programme instead of a series of separate bookings. It covers four things: choosing the right carrier and mode for each shipment, agreeing rates with those carriers, booking and tracking the work through our transportation management systems services, and checking the invoices that come back. Most businesses do the first three reasonably well and skip the fourth almost entirely, because freight invoices are complicated enough that checking them properly takes time nobody has. That is precisely why errors survive. An invoice that looks roughly right usually gets paid, and a charge that gets paid without question tends to appear again next month.
Freight Invoice Auditing
Freight invoices are unusually easy to get wrong, because a single shipment can carry a dozen separate charges. Published industry figures put the error rate at roughly 5 to 8 percent of invoices, and the errors are rarely in the shipper’s favour, one more reason spend visibility matters across our professional supply chain management work. The most common by far is a rate that does not match your agreement, usually because the carrier billed from their own rate table rather than your negotiated one. Next come accessorial charges added by default, such as a residential surcharge applied to a commercial address, or a liftgate fee for a site with a loading dock. Duplicate invoices are rarer but fully recoverable when caught, and where a shipment itself needs to come back, our reliable reverse logistics process handles that separately from the billing dispute. There is also a deadline most shippers never hear about: for LTL and truckload, an overcharge claim generally has to be made within about 180 days of paying the invoice, so an error found a year later is usually money you cannot get back. Checking before payment avoids all of that.
Our services
Getting the rate right, then making sure the invoice matches it.
Carrier & Rate Management
Choosing carriers and modes around your freight rather than defaulting to whoever you used last.
Invoice Audit & Reporting
Checking every invoice against what was actually agreed, before the payment goes out.
Common Billing Errors
The errors that show up most often, and cost the most over a year.
Rates Billed From The Wrong Table
Residential Surcharges On Commercial Addresses
Liftgate Fees Where A Dock Exists
Reweigh And Re-Measure Corrections
Freight Class Reclassification
Detention And Waiting Time
Fuel Surcharges Applied Incorrectly
Duplicate Invoices For One Shipment
Individually these look small enough to wave through, which is exactly why they persist. The cost only becomes visible when someone adds up twelve months of them across every carrier you use, including shippers running high-volume e-commerce freight through our Amazon FBA fulfillment solutions, where small per-shipment errors compound fastest.
The Practical Gains
Checking an invoice before it is paid keeps your money in your account while a dispute is sorted, rather than chasing it back afterwards.
Consolidated billing means your finance team reconciles one document rather than dozens.
Reporting by lane, carrier and mode, which is what makes the next negotiation an informed one.
Pricing
Priced around how much freight you move and how much of the programme we run.
The size of the programme being managed
How many loads move each month
Carrier management, invoice audit, or both
How many carrier relationships need managing
Send us a recent month of freight invoices. We will show you what a proper check finds before you commit to anything.
What The Audit Turned Up
Finance Manager
Building Products Distributor, Milton
“Our finance team was reconciling invoices from nine different carriers every month. Getting one consolidated bill saved them days, and the spend reporting told us which lanes were quietly costing us the most.”
Controller
Wholesale Supplier, Etobicoke
Freight Spend, Explained
Running your shipping as one managed programme: choosing carriers, agreeing rates, booking and tracking loads, and checking the invoices that come back.
A line by line check of each carrier invoice against your agreed rates and what actually shipped. It is different from your finance team confirming the total looks right, because it verifies every individual charge.
Published industry figures put the rate at roughly 5 to 8 percent of invoices, with some sources reporting higher. The errors mostly favour the carrier.
Before. Checking before payment keeps your money in your account while any dispute is resolved. Once an invoice is paid you are asking for money back, which takes longer and sometimes fails.
Generally yes. For LTL and truckload, overcharge claims usually need to be raised within about 180 days of the invoice being paid, so older errors often cannot be recovered.
No. We can manage the carriers you already use, or bring in additional ones where a lane would be better served. That decision stays yours.
Yes. Tracking and spend reporting are part of the service, so you have more visibility than before rather than less.
That depends entirely on your current carriers and how thoroughly you already check invoices. Rather than quote a percentage, we would rather review a recent month of your invoices and show you what is actually there.
Yes. Where a charge is wrong we raise and pursue it with the carrier, so your team is not chasing credits.
Send one month of freight invoices and we will show you what a proper check finds. No commitment either way.
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