Freight audit services are critical and paramount for any business that ships products. And if your business operates within a moderate to complex supply chain network, the accuracy of your freight audit and payment process can directly impact your costs.
Because of this, savvy businesses regularly utilize freight audit companies and firms to systematically audit carrier invoices and documentation. If you’re not too keen on partnering with an experienced vendor, you can always keep your freight auditing services in-house.
Let’s take a closer look at a few tips for how to start in-house freight auditing.
Overview of In-House Freight Audit Services
When a company chooses not to outsource its freight auditing, it can do so in-house. The freight audit services should be handled by an internal team that is dedicated to processing and managing bills for the organization. To properly perform a freight audit, you must train and onboard your employees to perform an array of tasks, including:
- Creating complex pricing rules for all modes of transportation
- Carefully searching for duplicate charges and other billing errors
- Verifying charge rates
- Ensuring routing compliance
- Recovering misapplied payments and resolving claims
- And more
Developing Your Own In-House Freight Audit Process
In general, there are three different ways companies can develop their own in-house freight auditing process.
Manually Auditing Freight
Manually auditing freight is simply not feasible for most businesses. Opting to go this route requires exceptional staff expertise with various facets, including:
- Accessorial charges
- Fuel charges
- Carrier discounts
- Carrier base rates
- Mileage variables
- Late-delivery adjustments
- Every other factor associated with billing and invoices
Needless to say, a considerable investment of time and manpower is required to do the auditing. At the same time, significant time and resources are required to stay up to date with carrier changes and information. While cumbersome and almost impossible to capture all the information, having a manual auditing system is better than no auditing at all.
Creating a Custom Freight Auditing Software
Another option is to create custom freight auditing software for your business. And as you can imagine, this method is arguably the most expensive.
Many extremely large firms have the human resources and capital to create custom freight auditing software. However, this option isn’t feasible for most small to midsize businesses. At the same time, it’s often not cost-effective for even the largest firms.
For starters, your custom freight auditing software must have the ability to receive electronic invoices from different carriers. Your IT department will be tasked with establishing a rating engine that can apply different carrier variables to every line item.
The custom software will also require detailed coding to assign revenues and costs to the proper customers, categories, and departments. Payment can be kept separate or incorporated as a component of the automation. However, input from your staff and regular updates to the software will be required as carrier information changes.
Purchase Out-of-the-Box Freight Auditing Software
A third option is to purchase freight auditing software that is already built. One of the biggest problems with purchasing an out-of-the-box freight auditing software is the exorbitant out-of-pocket costs to implement.
At the same time, the software may require customizations to meet the unique needs of your business. And you will still need a team to manage and update the software as well as analyze the capture data, which further increases your costs.
What’s the Best Method of Freight Auditing?
When it comes to freight audit services, the best solution is to partner with an experienced freight auditing firm. A dedicated freight audit firm will completely eliminate all manual processes and support the goals of your supply chain.
These tailored freight audit services offer you the expertise and tools to manage global shopping transactions across several regions and modes of transportation. In addition, freight audit and payment services tackle the responsibility of reviewing your routing compliance and contract as well as managing all claims — regardless of the mode of transportation or location. By choosing the right provider for outsourced freight audit services, you will enjoy a host of benefits that no mode of in-house freight auditing can offer.
Improved Efficiency with Outsourced Freight Audit Services
With outsourced freight auditing services, you can save time and avoid costly miscalculations. Inefficiencies are eliminated through innovative technology and the expertise of industry professionals.
Outsourced Post-Bill Freight Auditing Offers Enhanced Transparency
Controlling and understanding your transportation spend hinges on your ability to see across a multitude of variables — ranging from utilization to volumes to taxes to surcharges. Outsourcing your freight audit services opens the door to enhanced transparency to essential insights that can impact your bottom line.
Save Money with Freight Auditing Services
When you partner with the right freight auditing vendor, you will have access to state-of-the-art technology and decades of support to start saving. Best of all, you will gain these savings from freight audit services without having to shell out substantial capital that could be used in other areas of your business. Most freight auditing vendors will continually perform the audits and only charge you a percentage of the monies recovered.
Contact Trans Audit for Freight Audit Services Today
Performing an in-house freight invoice post audit can be time-consuming, tedious, and very confusing. Fortunately, you don’t have to! To date, countless savvy business owners have partnered with Trans Audit for money- and time-saving post audit services. We offer:
- Worldwide Transportation Cost Recovery & Reduction
- Unmatched Expertise, Resources, Analytics & Results
- Contingency Recovery of Overbillings and Overpayments
- Continuous Payment & Billing Improvements
- All Modes of Transportation in All Places
Through our world-class systems and processes, we establish recurring feeds of shipping data that include, freight invoices, rates, bills of lading, and more to perform a retrospective and recurring post-payment review.
We employ an unsurpassed team of subject-matter experts to create recoveries and value across all modes of transportation in all places. Trans Audit recovers more overpayments and identifies more cost reduction opportunities than competitive or internal reviews. And we do so with minimal input from your team.
