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Contracted rate vs. chargedWhat you should have paid against what you were billed.
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Surcharges and accessorialsRe-weighs, dim adjustments, residential, fuel, line by line.
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Variance and overchargesThe gap between quoted and billed, shipment by shipment.
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What's disputableThe slice you can actually file and recover.
A brand we work with had a carrier fully connected. Tracking numbers, delivery scans, service levels, the whole operational feed was flowing in. Everything looked covered. Then we went to evaluate the charges and hit a wall: there was nothing there to check.
The data we were pulling was operational. It was the same shape as what you already see in ShipStation. None of it was billing data.
Two different pipes
It is easy to assume that if you can see a carrier's shipments, you can see their charges. You usually can't. They travel through separate systems:
- Operational data tells you what happened to the package. Where it is, when it shipped, when it delivered, which service tier it moved on. This is what powers tracking and delivery reporting.
- Billing data tells you what you were charged for it. Base rate, surcharges, accessorials, adjustments, and the variance against your contracted rate. This is what powers an evaluation.
An operational feed can be 100% complete and still contain zero dollars. You can know exactly when every package arrived and have no idea whether you were overbilled on a single one of them.
What the invoice unlocks
Auditing for overcharges requires the invoice itself, and frequently it arrives on a different rail than the shipment data: emailed statements, a billing portal, an EDI feed, or a separate account entirely. With some carriers, the operational integration is the easy part and the invoices are the thing you have to go chase.
So the practical step, the same one we ran here, is to ask the carrier directly: how do the invoices arrive? Email, portal, or another system? Until that pipe is connected, the carrier is invisible to your evaluation even when the shipments are not, and it can quietly sit outside your weekly overcharge and variance review while every other carrier gets checked.
If you only wire up the operational side, you get a great tracking dashboard and a blind spot on the bill. An evaluation needs both pipes connected. Confirm you have the invoice data before you assume a carrier is covered.