Why so many freight invoices are wrong

A freight invoice is the bill a carrier sends you for moving your goods. It looks simple. One shipment, one price. But the price is built from many parts, and each part can go wrong.

What is in a freight bill

Take one pallet going from Hamburg to Lyon. The carrier, the company that moves it, charges:

• A base price. It depends on the weight, the distance (carriers call this a “zone”) and how fast it has to arrive: next day, in two days, or slow and cheap.
• A fuel surcharge. An extra percentage on top. It changes every month with the price of diesel.
• Extra charges. Waiting time at the loading dock, a lift at the back of the truck, delivery to a home address, customs paperwork, a busy-season fee.

That is five or six numbers, each looked up in a different table. Now multiply that by every shipment. A company with 20,000 shipments a year has more than 100,000 numbers to check.

The five mistakes we see most

1. The old price. You agreed new prices in January. The carrier’s system still bills the old prices for some routes until March. Nobody notices, because the difference per shipment is small.
2. The wrong weight. Your pallet weighs 240 kg. It was billed as 300 kg, because someone rounded up, or because the carrier charged by size instead of weight when your contract says they should not.
3. The charge that is billed twice. A fuel surcharge inside the base price, and again as a separate line. Or a busy-season fee in a quiet month.
4. The wrong zone. The delivery address is in zone 2, but it was billed as zone 3. Postcode tables change. Carriers do not always update them.
5. Extra charges that never happened. Waiting time when nobody waited. A truck lift for a delivery to a warehouse that has its own loading dock. These are hard to check later, so they usually get paid.

Most of the time, nobody is cheating. This is what happens when two big computer systems talk to each other through PDFs and emails.

Why nobody catches it

Three reasons, and they are the same in almost every company:

• There are too many. Ten thousand invoices a year is forty a day. Nobody has that job.
• The price list is not in one place. It is a PDF from the contract, an Excel file from the buying team, and three emails with changes. To check one invoice, you need all of them.
• Each amount is small. Twelve euros here, thirty there. It does not feel worth an hour of anyone’s time. Over a year, it adds up to real money.

A test you can do this week

Pick one carrier and one month. Take twenty invoices. Sit down with the price list and check them by hand. For each one, write down the agreed price, the billed price, and the difference.

It takes half an hour, maybe an hour. If two or more of the twenty are wrong, that is not bad luck. It is a pattern. The same mistakes are in the other eleven months, and with the other carriers.

That is the point where it makes sense to check everything. A Process Scan of your freight invoices does exactly that.