Freight audit

By definition an audit is,

A freight audit vendor is therefore one who examines, adjusts and verifies freight bills for accuracy.

Therefore, a freight audit is the process of examining, adjusting and verifying freight bills for accuracy.

Freight costs

Rising freight cost is an emerging area of concern as seen in recent years. The cost of freight has been rising due to the increase in oil prices and all freight cost is highly dependent on the cost of transportation which relates directly to fuel prices. With high fluctuations of fuel costs, low visibility of the future freight costs and high complexity of the freight quotes, freight cost verification are vulnerable to human and process errors and this requires proper auditing to ensure that the organization does not overpay for services it did not incur.

The forwarder freight rates are usually maintained in multiple spreadsheets and usually each forwarder has a different freight rate format to the customer. An organization is daunted with the task of calculating the freight rates manually and this task can be challenging when the customer has hundreds of shipments shipped each month. Most organizations do not have the manpower to calculate all the freight invoices issued to them and at best, they perform random sampling to check if the sample invoice is billed correctly. Some organizations have the manpower to perform freight audit themselves, the manual and tedious efforts required for a freight audit will usually end up much more expensive than an outsource vendor might be able to provide.

Based on the research of inboundlogistics.com, freight costs can make up 10% of an organization’s expenditure. As a consequence of rising freight costs, an increasing number of organizations has been more proactive in controlling freight cost and outsourced the freight audit process to freight audit specialists.

Many Freight Auditors are now offering Parcel Auditing Services which include UPS, Federal Express, DHL, Purolator etc...

Inbound logistics details the freight audit process as follows:

“To begin the auditing process, a freight bill payment company receives its clients' freight bills directly from carriers. When the bills are received, either via electronic data interchange (EDI) or manually, they are entered into the contractor's system, providing immediate visibility. Once the bills are entered, they are audited for accuracy. Auditors verify the bills' validity, mileage, duplicate payments, accessorial charges, and use of correct tariffs. After auditing, the charges are coded and reconciled, and the bills are paid.”

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