Why You Should Track Parcel Shipping Spend
With e-commerce currently booming more parcels are being shipped than ever before, and delivery costs can very quickly add up. Remain competitive and keep an eye on your expenditure by auditing your parcel invoices and tracking your parcel shipping spend.
The Cost of Meeting Customer Expectations
Successful businesses understand the need to meet the demands of their customer, which means engaging the services of a delivery company to ensure the goods get to the right place at the right time. Traditional distribution channels have their place, but customers now demand shorter lead-times, and are often keen to receive their goods as soon as possible.
Alongside standard delivery there’s next day delivery requests and even same day delivery requests to contend with. If you want to offer these options in a bid to keep up with the competition and meet the high expectations of your customers, you will need to be prepared to ship more parcels.
A Focus on Shipping Spend and Controlling Costs
Successful organizations understand the importance of tracking transport costs, and realize it’s essential that these principles are applied to regular parcel despatches and one-off parcel shipments too.
There are a few things you can do to control shipping spend, such as you’re your despatches, consolidate loads, reduce packaging and track parcel shipping spend via parcel auditing.
The Benefits of Parcel Auditing
Parcel auditing can provide a useful insight into your freight costs – this can be used to help you to reduce costs and even recoup money from your freight provider. Do you use automated billing to pay your freight costs? If so, you could be paying invoices that are incorrect, without even realizing it.
Delivery companies are not always spot on, which unfortunately leaves room for error. You may discover your parcel has been delivered late or to the wrong address. You might find out that your delivery company is charging the wrong rate, which has led to you being overcharged. Paperwork can be printed incorrectly and fees can be applied in error. You could be incurring costs you’re not liable for, and unless you carry out a parcel audit you will remain unaware, and also out of pocket!
Carrying out a parcel audits to track your shipping spend can be a challenging business if you try and go it alone. You will have to allocate time and resources to complete the task – which means either sitting down yourself or arming an employee with a calculator and your invoices. No mean feat when you have a busy office to run and lots of jobs already on the “to-do” list.
You can get the job done more efficiently by outsourcing your parcel auditing to a reputable company. A freight auditor will compare invoices with your pricing contract and seek out any discrepancies. If they identify a problem e.g. you might have been overcharged by your freight company for a particular delivery, the auditor will follow up, try and get to the bottom of the problem and recover your money.
Meeting Future Demand
We’ve touched on the growth of e-commerce and parcel shipments, and this trend looks set to continue. Studies predict that global retail eCommerce sales will reach dizzying new heights by 2021, an it’s widely believed that demand for same-day delivery will increase – pushing delivery costs even higher as companies endeavour to keep their customers happy. There will be more pressure on businesses to fulfil orders quickly, and therefore more demand on freight forward carriers to ship parcels.
This added pressure could lead to an increase in errors relating to shipment and delivery, and with even more paperwork to trawl through you will have your work cut out trying to carry out an in-house parcel audit. Add to this the fact that carriers can increase their rates as and when they see fit, increasing shipping spend even more, and we start to understand why the need to audit parcel freight deliveries and keep on top of shipping spend will be more prevalent than ever before.
It’s Time to Challenge Your Freight Company
Here at Betachon we’re dedicated to recouping funds for businesses. We will sort through invoices and use our well-honed auditing skills to identify discrepancies. We can carry out a DHL audit, FedEx audit and UPS audit on your behalf and will secure refunds on your behalf.