Freight audit involves reviewing transportation bills to ensure pricing and charges are accurate. It helps businesses identify discrepancies, overcharges, and billing errors, optimizing overall shipping costs. Freight audit is essential because it allows businesses to control their logistics expenses. By regularly auditing freight invoices, companies can ensure they’re not overpaying for services and can negotiate better rates with carriers, improving their bottom line and ensuring financial accountability.
Why are freight audits important?
Freight audit is a vital process for businesses to ensure that they are being charged accurately for their shipping services. It involves reviewing transportation bills to ensure that pricing and charges are correct, which can help businesses identify overcharges and billing errors. Freight audit is essential for controlling transportation costs and improving supply chain efficiency. By auditing freight bills, businesses can detect discrepancies and optimize shipping costs. This process helps companies ensure that they are only paying for the services they actually use, avoiding unnecessary expenses. Regular freight audits provide valuable data for negotiating better terms with carriers, and they can help businesses streamline their shipping processes, ensuring that every transaction is both accurate and fair.
How to do freight audits
To conduct a freight audit, businesses should first gather all relevant shipping invoices and documentation. They can then review the charges on the invoices, comparing them to the agreed-upon rates and services. Any discrepancies or overcharges should be identified and addressed with the carrier. Businesses can also analyze the data from the freight audits to identify opportunities for cost savings, such as negotiating better rates or optimizing shipping routes.
Freight audits and Parabola
Parabola transforms your freight and parcel audit processes by automatically ingesting data from carrier CSVs, PDFs, and third-party portals, then compares that data against rate cards to find overages or inaccurate charges. With most carriers providing only 30-60 days to submit a dispute, audit velocity is key for any team shipping at scale — and auditing in spreadsheets leads to human error, unscalable process, missed savings, and limited visibility into billing discrepancies across carriers.
Beyond reconciling values like parcel rates and fuel surcharges, Parabola can also audit more complex values like accessorial fees, weight and dimensional charges, service level failures, and volume-based discounts. Even if your rate cards and invoice PDFs are totally unstructured and lack standardization.
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