Fighting the fight on hidden fees.
How often does your $20 projected delivery costs, end up costing you $60? Or even worse, how often might have you overlooked these hidden fees in a desperate attempt to get your deliveries out as soon as possible? There is no doubt that the answer is all too often.
When shipping your goods through a freight provider, sometimes you may experience some unpleasant surprises when receiving your end-of-month invoice. These surprises might include items such as fuel surcharge fees, manual handling fees, remote area fees, and the list goes on.
What’s worse than these unpleasant surprises, is actually not knowing about them. Nestled somewhere in an unknown invoice, your accounts team has an ongoing, uninterrupted cycle of paying for these hidden fees, without anyone knowing better!
This is a problem faced by many growing businesses thanks to freight providers – let’s call them “ACME” – that do not have a high level of transparency. Companies like ACME find it much easier to offer their clients a too-hard-to-resists rate card and worry about invoicing their clients the extra fees and surcharges well after the delivery has been made.
To better your knowledge on fulfilment costs, we’ve gone ahead and run an invoice analysis of ACME.
Understanding how ACME will invoice your business
Let’s say Client 1 would like ACME to deliver an oversized item from Melbourne to Brisbane.
ACME will provide Client 1 with an initial invoice that will look a little something like this…
The invoice looks great, Client 1 is happy, and without a second thought, the accounts team pays the invoice.
In about 2 weeks’ time, ACME will issue Client 1 with a new invoice, referencing the same connote number, only this time that invoice will carry the extra fees and surcharges. Client 1 will pay this invoice.
So, in summary, the total cost for the goods delivered now looks a little something like this…
Not so cheap, is it?
Identifying those extra fees and surcharges isn’t so obvious either. Your team might have to review the monthly connotes and run a report to assess any duplicates to get the accurate total cost of the delivery. The other difficultly in doing so, is that sometimes these additional fees and surcharges can be referenced under a new or second connote number, however there should always be a reference to the old connote number.
Now let’s be clear, fees and surcharges are not an uncommon thing when it comes to logistics – after all, moving parcels around Australia and the globe isn’t for nothing. However, having your courier company identify those charges before the delivery is completed, can help your team and business establish true projected delivery costs.
When it comes to identifying the right courier company to deliver your goods, transparency is key.
IGX is proud to provide all its customers with all costs, upfront. It’s that simple.