Dotting your i's and crossing your t's

I had a conversation this afternoon with a client about a problem we were having collecting an overcharge for them. They had some Pallet Rates published for their freight, both inbound and outbound. Unfortunately the carrier's pricing only named one location - 1070 Main Street, whereas this freight was delivered to them at 1067 Main Street. The carrier was refusing to honor the pricing because that address wasn't listed in their Pricing Agreement with the customer. I was directed to contact their sales representative to ask him to pursue a "business management decision".

I called the rep and told him I thought it was silly to have to jump through hoops to get the pricing applied when the freight was clearly routed based on this pricing. I continue to wonder why carriers who began business in a heavily regulated environment that permitted no deviation from the published and filed rates are unable to operate in the fully deregulated environment. In any other business, if a price was agreed to for a particular customer, the invoice would be corrected if one location was overlooked or they had additional street numbers (as this client does).

The client had called me back to tell me they had only one building - the entire facility was in one building. The two addresses were a vestige of its original construction where the developer could divide the building for two companies if necessary.

I sympathize with a carrier's desire to rate things correctly in the first place; to set in their computer system the information it needs to do that. But the reality is, sometimes every contingency isn't known (or someone doesn't think to say we've got two street numbers here). It's one of the reasons that I've suggested clients write language in their contracts that essentially says "when XYZ Corporation pays the bill, this pricing will apply." No "ifs", "ands" or "buts" - keep it simple.

We Make Your Carriers Better

It's a hazard of our work as freight bill auditors that we help your carriers rate your bills correctly. I was reminded of this today when one of my staff told me she spoke to one small carrier who we had filed an overcharge claim against. Our claim for a bit over $100 had prompted them to review the client's other bills and they had found other overcharges too. So instead of recovering about $113 for them, the carrier is sending them a check for $1374!
Not only that, but now they will probably not make that mistake again.

We had one account we began auditing a few years ago and one carrier was regularly charging their standard Liftgate charge. The problem was their contract named a different charge and the carrier was overlooking that. We filed claim correcting those bills and recovered that money for the client. Now the carrier rarely misses that contractual charge - an added benefit which costs our customer nothing.

Give us a call to discuss how we can make your carriers better with our freight bill audit.