When not to issue the invoice

When you find an uninvoiced service performed a year ago, the first impulse is to invoice it. The money was earned, after all.

Before that, two questions are worth answering, and only one of them is legal.

First: is it still possible

Many forwarding contracts contain a clause on the period for issuing invoices after the service has been performed. It is less well known than the invoice dispute deadline, but it works the same way: after it, no invoice can be issued.

If there is no such clause, the general limitation periods apply, and they are considerably longer. Then the answer to the first question is most likely “it is”.

Second: is it worth it

This question matters more, and the law does not answer it.

An unexpected invoice for a service performed a year ago tells the customer one of two things: either your accounting is in disorder, or you are going back through the past looking for something else to charge for. Neither version is good.

A practical consequence worth weighing in advance: a customer who receives such an invoice almost always starts checking the others. And often rightly so — because if you forgot to issue one line, you may have issued another one twice.

That does not mean it is never worth it. It means the amount has to be large enough to pay for the explanation, and the circumstances have to be such that they can be explained in one sentence without excuses.

A limit worth setting in advance

It helps to have an internal decision: how many months back the company issues invoices at all, and from what amount.

Such a decision has two values. First, it saves a discussion in every individual case. Second — and more importantly — it lets the result of a leakage search be split into two lists straight away, instead of waiting for every case to be deliberated.

Without such a limit, a leakage audit produces a list that sits for a month, because every entry needs a decision.

Why most of the value is not in the invoices

If a leakage search produces a hundred cases of which fifteen are worth invoicing, it is easy to conclude that the result is mediocre.

That is the wrong basis for the calculation. A hundred cases are not a hundred coincidences — they are a few mechanisms repeated many times over. If the reefer plug-in went uncharged thirty-four times out of forty-one, that is not thirty-four findings but one process in which the service is not captured at the point where the invoice is built.

Fix that point and the leakage stops. Not decreases — stops, because it was never random.

That is why the right basis for the value of a leakage audit is not the total of the invoices issued but the monthly leakage that stopped. The first is one-off; the second works every month.

And one thing that does not touch invoices at all

Not every leakage is an uninvoiced service. Part of it is an invoice issued correctly but at an old rate, with an indexation never carried out or a surcharge never passed on. In those cases the invoice existed, and the customer paid it — only for less than it should have been.

These cases are commercially harder than uninvoiced services, because here you do not have to issue a new document but to explain why the earlier one was wrong. In practice they almost always go onto the “fix it going forward” list, and that is right.