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Are you in charge of making sure that all freight and carrier invoices are accurate? We can agree that it’s a vital yet painstaking job.
If you find yourself buried under all the paperwork, it’s time to consider outsourcing or automating your processes! For your company to discover cost-saving opportunities, freight auditing should be mandatory. It’s especially important for all companies that ship high volumes of packages. Learn how to choose the best freight audit partner for your company to be stress-free and increase your bottom line.
Freight auditing can take a long time to process, especially when you’re manually auditing the carrier invoices. Manual processes leave plenty of room for error which can be expensive. Luckily for you, there are options that automate freight auditing so that you can focus on developing your business strategies.
A Glance at the Traditional Freight Audit Process
Before considering your cost-saving options, let’s look at the freight audit process to better understand how a freight audit partner or audit software will help you.
- Upload freight invoices on one location for centralized access
- Categorize invoices for seamless comparison and analysis
- Confirm base rates on freight bills
- Verify extra charges and reduced rates, like accessorial charges and discounts
- Check for errors like duplicate charges
- Analyze the data for trends to determine benchmark goals
Why the Traditional Freight Auditing Has Its Challenges
The biggest challenge of in-house freight auditing manually is the time, resources, and skills your company must dedicate to handling the high volume of freight bill invoices. You can easily get swept up in a sea of paperwork that requires close attention to detail to accurately audit the freight bills. As time passes and packages are continuously shipped, the invoices you must audit will only increase exponentially.
The high volume of paperwork aside, the complexity of freight rates makes it even more difficult to verify the charges. Especially when each carrier has different rates with your company; it’s hard to keep track of it all! And as a final nail in the coffin, you must also communicate back-and-forth with carriers to resolve any outstanding issues to prevent overcharges.
The manual freight auditing process can cause many issues to resolve, maybe even more than you can handle internally. Not only would your time and resources be wasted, but manual audits can cost you a lot of money over time. It may even negatively affect your relationships with carriers if errors aren’t properly managed.
Your Cost-Saving Options for Freight Bill Auditing
With many complexities of freight carriers, manual processes take valuable resources away from areas you could gain more value from. If your company suffers due to inefficiencies of manual auditing, you must consider automation or outsourcing.
Choosing freight audit automation as your partner might be the best solution to significantly decrease the risk for errors. So, what should a freight audit company do for you?
- Verify charge/base rates and claims with your carrier contracts
- Ensure discounts, taxes, and additional charges are accurately reflected on freight bills
- Detect duplicate charges and/or freight invoices
- Resolve errors and claims directly with carriers
10 Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing the Best Freight Audit Partner
- Does the freight audit company offer other services outside of the basic services?
- What kind of reputation does the freight audit company have in the industry?
- If you ship globally, can the provider handle auditing in other currencies and languages?
- How will the freight audit company securely store your company’s private data?
- Can the freight audit company handle invoices from all the transportation modes you use?
- Is the freight audit provider able to scale up with your company as it grows?
- How does their customer service affect your day-to-day collaboration with that provider?
- What insights can the freight audit company provide for you on a regular basis?
- How do they handle errors on freight invoices with the carriers?
- How does the freight audit company manage its relationships with carriers?
Partner with Third-Party Freight Audit Companies
Instead of automation, you can delegate the complex processes to a third-party company that is dedicated to freight auditing. Although these companies are specialized in freight audits, they’re still at the same risk for human errors.
There are lots of services the freight audit companies can provide for your business, but overall, outsourcing should help decrease miscalculations and increase supply chain performance. Therefore, it’s crucial that you partner with the best freight audit company to handle your freight invoices.
Automate with Freight Audit Software
Implementing a freight audit solution is the best way to keep your data in-house instead of trusting a third-party audit company with your private data. A software like AuditERP streamlines your processes so you don’t have to worry about missing any discrepancies.
Automation offers a solution to human errors in which 15% of all carrier invoices are incorrect. With an auditing solution, you’ll never overpay a freight bill again!
Not only would your company gain process efficiency, but you’d also improve internal communication with all the freight data centralized in one platform for seamless access by all departments. Lucky for you, some audit solutions can integrate with your existing transportation management or shipping system which makes implementation easier to process.
Discover how the features of AuditERP can save you costs in our customer success stories with companies like MCR Safety and A. O. Smith.
If you’re still manually auditing your freight bill invoices, we highly recommend looking at alternatives to save costs and resources for your company. Outsourcing to a third-party freight audit provider is certainly an option, but it comes with the same risk for human errors even if the company is specialized in this service. As long as it’s handled by people, the auditing would never be 100%. The best solution in the long run that can both save you money and retain your crucial data in-house would be to integrate a freight audit solution into your shipping solution.
