If you’re looking to create savings for the transportation or logistics department, two of the most powerful tools you can use are freight bill prepayment audit vs post payment audit. While both types of audit can open the door to savings, valuable intel, and more; freight bill pre-audit and freight bill post audits are different services.
To help you understand the differences, the team at Trans Audit has created a simple head-to-head guide analyzing freight bill prepayment audit vs post payment audit. Continue reading to learn more and do not hesitate to reach out to the team at Trans Audit for additional information about its unsurpassed freight and parcel post audit services.
What Are Freight and Parcel Audits
Although it is easy to control the costs you can see, it is virtually impossible to manage the costs you cannot. Whether you know it or not, errors on your freight invoices are extremely common and are draining profits from your company.
Carrier billing systems are very prone to errors. Some of the most common types of errors that can be discovered via a freight audit include, but not limited to:
- Incorrect rates
- Misapplied and inapplicable accessorial charges
- Miscalculated fuel surcharges
- Duplicate billing
- Billing to the wrong party
- Improper classification of shipped products
In the most simple sense, a freight audit is where the team at Trans Audit verifies that all carriers bills are in line with the agreed-upon pricing contracts. Freight audits are designed to make sure you are paying the correct amount and that you have not been inaccurately billed, overbilled, or double charged. There are two different types of freight bill audits — freight bill pre-audit vs freight bill post audit.
What Is a Freight Bill Pre-Audit?
As the name suggests, a freight bill pre-audit involves auditing a freight bill prior to you paying it. Freight bill pre-audits can be a valuable way to discover opportunities for savings as well as a way of ensuring you’re meeting all contractual obligations with your partners. This method helps apply proper taxation, appropriate rates, and more.
Freight bill pre audits can be especially helpful when your routes are complex. A few key areas of scrutiny for freight bill pre audits include:
- Duplicate charges
- Rating errors
- Incorrect weights and accessorial fees
- Incorrect product classifications
- Incorrect bill-to party
What Is a Freight Bill Post Audit
Freight bill post audits are designed to determine whether you have been overcharged or overbilled after you’ve paid the bill. To facilitate a post audit, the Trans Audit team establishes recurring feeds of paper and electronic invoices, bills of lading, rates, contracts, and payment information to perform an ongoing review.
At Trans Audit, we will work directly with your freight bill payment firm and/or your carriers to collect key data as well as negotiate and ascertain refunds. Best of all, the amount of time expended by your team is minimal because we virtually handle everything. At Trans Audit, the depth and breadth of our post audit is extremely expansive and includes:
- Line-by-line reconciliation of rates, contract terms, classifications, and tariffs with billing
- Meticulous audit and analysis of all global parcel, freight, processing, and logistics charges
- Service level confirmation and recovery for deliveries that have failed
- Payment and billing analysis at the invoice level, bill of lading level, car/container level, etc.
- Creation, processing, and filing of refund claims for overcharges
- Identification of overcharges and substantiation of refund claims
- Identification of cost reduction and contract improvement opportunities
- Recovery of ongoing and historical overpayments and overbilling
- Multi-lingual support and a presence in Asia and Europe enables worldwide review, especially in high volume lanes
- Structured holistic claims management from submission through resolution
Freight Bill Pre Audit vs Freight Bill Post Audit
While the pre-audit focuses on prior to you paying, a post audit helps you determine whether you have been overbilled or overcharged for different aspects of your bill. And at Trans Audit, our freight post audit process is much more extensive, which increases the likelihood we’ll find an error. As we previously mentioned, we will establish a recurring, ongoing feed to scrutinize all of your payments.
As valuable as the pre-audit is, it can’t provide you with the holistic picture on its own. Instead, a pre-audit should almost always be correlated with a comprehensive freight bill post audit. The post audit is integral in helping you determine whether your account has been incorrectly charged or overcharged.
Another key area that differentiates the freight bill pre-audit vs post audit is the time span. The pre-audit will be performed prior to paying a specific set of bills. In contrast, the post audit can be conducted a few months after you’ve submitted payment for the bill.
It’s simple: companies that fail to perform regular post audits are at risk of sustaining large, ongoing, significant losses. Instead of hemorrhaging losses, the team at Trans Audit offer a comprehensive freight bill post audit service designed to generate real savings and dynamic intel.
Contact Trans Audit for Freight Bill Post Audit
Any transportation and logistics department is bound to be extremely complex with several moving parts! Because of this, it’s easy to suffer errors in billing and overcharges. It’s important to understand these errors are rarely done in malice and can be the result of the ever-common human error.
Unfortunately, a freight bill pre-audit isn’t designed to thoroughly capture these errors. However, the freight bill post audit is. Failure to capture and correct these errors in billing can continue well into the future and negatively impact your bottom line.
Fortunately, the team at Trans Audit offers a comprehensive, recurring freight bill post audit service. With minimal input and support from your team, we will establish a system designed to quickly capture errors and recover funds rightly owed to your business.
Contact Trans Audit today to learn more about how we can help with our freight bill post audit service.
