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!
