Overview

Overview

A shipping audit is a process of verifying your entire supply and delivery chain by checking invoices for shipment inconsistencies. This can help verify the health of your overall shipping ecosystem. It can also be incredibly useful to prevent overpayment and inefficiencies. At many large organizations, a dedicated shipping audit team is constantly working to verify that invoices have been billed accurately for shipments and that the company’s entire shipping infrastructure is as efficient as possible.

Shipping Audit

The Courier Shipping audit must be performed on shipments within 15 days of delivery, therefore, it must be continually performed on an ongoing basis or the organization will lose the benefits being realized.

After receiving online access to the shipping account(s) for “Account.Name”, we set the organization up on our shipping portal platform.

In addition to the application of proprietary knowledge and methods, the following bullet points outline some of the steps performed throughout the detailed audit process:

• Review of present courier shipping contract rates to assure that client cost is in line with what the market dictates for like-type accounts.
• Analysis of shipping routes and methods being selected was performed to identify whether opportunities may exist to utilize lesser expensive option per parcel to achieve the same delivery date (ie – Ground Shipping vs 2-Day Air/cost vs time-to-deliver).
• Comparative analysis was completed between courier shipping providers to assure that present solution is the most appropriate based on the markets being served by the client.

Freight Audit

After receiving an initial data set comprised of freight invoices for the organization, we communicated with the provider(s) to obtain account data.

In addition to the application of proprietary knowledge and methods, the following bullet points outline some of the steps performed throughout the detailed audit process:

• Evaluation of current carrier pricing discounts and tariffs
• Validate carrier pricing against current shipping volume
• Review carrier mix to identify any gaps in coverage, evaluate claims with each carrier.
• Potentially recommend using a Transportation Management System to pre audit invoices, obtain better pricing structures and create bills of lading.  It will also allow freight decisions to be based on price, insurance, and transit time with complete visibility of movement.  Ability to load existing and preferred carriers into TMS.
• Identify any billing errors in freight invoices.
• Validate class of freight
• Potentially help with freight modeling to present to freight carriers for RFP process.