Bolstering the bottom line

There was a good article in this month's Logistics Management magazine titled 5 Challenges You Can't Ignore by Brent Wm. Primus. Primus talks about various areas of transportation that the astute shipper needs to be attentive to - some very good advice in the piece, so check out the article.



The purpose of my blog today though is to highlight a chart in the article originally developed by the great Bill Augello, a transportation attorney who wrote prolifically about transportation law. He passed away in November, 2006, a great loss for the transportation industry. I had the privileged on a number of occasions to meet Bill and to talk with him over the phone. He was passionate about educating shippers and receivers about transportation law so they could make the best decisions in their ongoing shipping transactions.

The chart Augello created showed the amounts one needed to capture from the dollar losses of a claim. It's startling how a minor claim requires a sizeable sale to recover the lost revenue incurred by the uncollected loss or damage claim.


A good example is in the area of claims management and recovery. Figure 1, prepared by Bill Augello, illustrates the importance of recovering claims for loss and damage and shows how unrecoverable claims can erode a company’s profitability. Unfortunately I can't reproduce the chart here, but it is in the article linked above.

Basically, money overpaid to your carriers is money that is being taken from your bottom line. The chart shows, for instance, that a loss of $500 would require sales equal to $10,000 to make up that lost money (based on a 5% net profit margin). So if we recover a $1000 from one of your carriers, that would be equivalent to a sale of $20,000 under the same scenario. Our overcharge recoveries for you are nothing but an addition to your bottom line. As we state on our website, we have recovered millions of dollars for our clients over the years.

Check with us for our freight bill auditing service - your bottom line will thank you!

Waiting for Godot? New Year's Work...

Well, we're not actually waiting for Godot (the title of a Samuel Beckett play), unless, of course, Godot is an accountant working for one of our clients!

In the freight bill auditing business, we often have a lag auditing bills in the first month or two of the new year. An email to a client asking them to send their next batch of freight bills to us for audit brought the standard response, "We're waiting for our auditors to finish with their work and then we'll send them right to you." I'll give them another call today and hopefully they will have closed out their year and we can get right on their bills.

It's not always that way - we have many clients who have their Freight Payment provider ship their bills to us each week. For those clients, we often do the audit and place their bills into storage boxes and send the bills on to them ready for their Records Retention department (or arrange for their Records Storage company to pick them up). It does give us regular ongoing work, while we wait for Godot or Smith or Kowalsky to finish the bookkeeping for the other clients!

If your accountants have finished the year end work, why not give us a call and make arrangements for us to do a post audit of your freight bills for you. We continue to find mistakes even after payment audits. We'd love to have the chance to bring some of your money back to you.

Many of our other clients are very satisfied by our auditing work. Call us today!