The Check Was in the Mail!

I explain to clients that our freight bill auditing service is often a roll of the dice. We never know what we're going to find in an audit, nor do we know how quickly we will receive the refund check from their carrier. Most handle our overcharge claims routinely and are prompt in sending the client's refund or explaining why they disagree with our claim. When a carrier does decline a claim, we review it and if we disagree advise why they're mistaken.

I received a check this morning for nearly $7000 for a client for a claim we filed back in February. The customer had sent out some product without a proper description for the goods and mentioned the word "display" on their Bill of Lading. The shipment wasn't a display. It was their main product and merely had some additional corrugated cardboard they called a "wedge" that permitted the item to angle up on the store shelf.

The carrier replied that they had a rule about product shipped in cartons that are for display (much as you might see at a warehouse club). But that's not what these were. The carrier parried back, sending some photos of some of my client's shipments which were such displays. There was only one problem. The photos were not of these shipments, but some other unrelated item. The claim languished until we spoke with our client a few weeks ago and I went over the reasons their carrier was wrong.

Lo and behold, the check arrived in the mail! My client told me he knew about it a week ago, but wanted me to be surprised, and it was a nice one at that. At times, some of our work can be like a chess match and it's fun occasionally to match wits with a carrier and to prevail. This was one of those times.

And we got to send almost $7000 over to our customer, money they had already spent and now has come back to them. We're always looking for new bills to audit, and most of the bills we check are after they've been processed and paid by another outside payment and audit service. Give us a call if you'd like to start receiving refunds back on your freight bills too.

You can read more about our services here: http://www.tscinti.com/

Auditing EDI freight bills

Another big change in the thirty years I've been in business is the presentation of freight bills by EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). EDI came on the scene in the early 1990's and it's only been over the last several years that we've had more clients move to receiving their freight bills via EDI. Initially the few clients who had EDI bills, a number had their freight payment companies print out the bills, perhaps two or three to a page and we would audit from those printed pages. This wasn't something we had requested, it just happened to be what their procedure was.

Of course, printing the bills out defeated one of the advantages of using EDI; eliminating the use of paper. Some years ago, we had a software developer create an EDI bill reader for us that would permit us to see the data in a freight bill format. We could then audit the bills from the screen and print a "freight bill" to submit an overcharge from that copy. For those clients who sent us EDI bills, we would find mistakes, just as we do with actual paper freight bills. For a while, we did hav one client send us an Excel spreadsheet of their EDI bills and found mistakes on those bills as well.

We have talked with some clients to get their EDI data, but unfortunately, as is the case these days, it's not a priority.

This week though, in reviewing the payment info on the freight payment firms site for one client whose bills had dwindled down to just a few paper freight bills that we could audit. In checking payment information on a bill, we saw that we could run a report of the bills presented as EDI bills. We could sort them by carrier, by month. And so we did and started checking the bills for overcharges.

It was a tedious process that took the better part of the week, but we found a series of shipments which the carrier had inspected and misrated. In fact, they decided eleven of the shipments were class 200, eleven were class 92.5 and the rest they left at the class 50 shown on the bill of lading. We received photos of the inspection and determined that the class 200 was not correct, but decided the class 92.5 was probably correct. For this customer, they get an FAK rating of class 60.

On another EDI bill, it was rated as an expedited freight bill although such service was not requested on the bill of lading. Likewise, we noticed that the bill of lading said the first item was nine cartons weighing 4065 lbs on one pallet. Being familiar with this client's freight, we didn't think they had freight that heavy. Sure enough, the shipment only weighed 406 lbs. We've now filed a claim to get more than $1100 back for this client and their sales representative concurred and sent a note to their Overcharge Claims Department clearing the bill for a refund.

EDI is a tremendous tool for receiving freight bills quickly and allow for an audit, but such audits should always be follow up with a post auditing such as we perform. I always tell prospective clients that every time I think I've seen every way possible for a mistake to happen, we see a new way. And we've been doing this for thirty years now.

Give us a call to talk about how we can recover such overcharges for you!

Celebrating 30 years! Traffic Services of Cinti

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the founding of Traffic Services of Cinti, Inc. I had been working for my dad's business, Jayanel Associates (a name referencing my parents' initials "J" and "L" for Jerry & Loretta) and it became clear that the business could not sustain the staff he had. I took over the freight bill auditing and transportation consulting portion of the business. I was renting a three bedroom house across from my present home and had two spare bedrooms; my first offices!

Besides the freight bill audit accounts, I had several companies I did consulting for, mostly printing companies that need to be able to get rate quotations and freight costs before motor carriers rate clerks came to work in the afternoon. They would call me to get the freight charges so they could set up their billing or their sales department would call to add freight costs into their estimates. This was a year before the first foray into the deregulation of the trucking industry with the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 (which, if I remember correctly, took effect exactly one year later on July 1, 1980). All carriers rates were essentially the same and we subscribed to the many different volumes of the carrier rate bureaus. We had scores of tariffs shelved in the one room and each day we'd receive more supplements to those tariffs.

It's been a long time since I've written a blog entry and I'll add more as the anniversary date approaches. It will be interesting to write about all the changes that have occurred in the trucking business and the freight auditing business over the last thirty years.