Exchange rate and conversion audit

A fuel surcharge is a separate invoice line. A terminal fee is a separate line. A currency margin has no line — it is built into the rate itself. That is why checking an invoice line by line never finds it: it takes a calculation that is not on the invoice.

The calculation you can do yourself

Divide the amount in euros by the amount in the foreign currency. That gives you the rate actually applied. Compare it with the European Central Bank reference rate for that day.

The difference is the margin. It is not disclosed and there is no obligation to disclose it — it is part of the price, like any other part.

There is a free calculator for this: enter the amount, the currency, the amount in euros and the date.

Exchange rate calculator

Whether the margin is a breach depends on your contract

This is something to say before, not after.

Most carriage and forwarding contracts say nothing at all about the exchange rate. Some contain a clause allowing the carrier to apply its own rate.

If the contract allows the carrier to set the rate, the margin is lawful, and there is no claim. How large it is, is a commercial question, not an accounting one.

That is why we keep the results in two types, and never add them together:

A breach. The contract names a rate source and a different one was applied. That is a claim, and our fee is calculated on the amount recovered — 25 %.

A commercial observation. The contract is silent or allows the other side's rate. This is not a claim. It is a figure showing what that clause costs per year, and an argument for the next contract renewal. It is not part of the amount found, and we charge nothing on it.

The second type is often the more useful one, because it works forward and needs neither a claim, nor a deadline, nor the other side's consent.

What wording is worth asking for in the contract

A clause that works has three elements. Without the third it changes practically nothing:

1. The source — whose rate applies.

2. The date — which day's rate, and what happens when no rate is published that day.

3. No margin — a direct sentence stating that no additional conversion margin is applied.

Sample wording you can put on the table in negotiations:

“Amounts invoiced in a currency other than the euro shall be converted at the reference rate published by the European Central Bank on the invoice date; if no rate is published on that date — at the last rate published before it. No additional conversion margin shall be applied.”

This is an example, not legal advice — the wording is worth agreeing with your own lawyer.

A weekend date — why we do not check it

The European Central Bank publishes reference rates on TARGET business days. There is no rate for a Saturday, a Sunday or a TARGET holiday.

If your invoice is dated on such a day and the contract does not say which rate applies then, we do not carry out the check. We do not take the “nearest” rate and treat it as correct — that would be our assumption, not a contract term, and a claim cannot be built on it.

Roughly a third of calendar days are not TARGET business days. If we accepted the assumption quietly, every third invoice would be checked against a rate that is not in your contract. In the report such documents are listed separately, under “could not be checked”.

On customs declarations the rate is monthly

Converting the customs value does not use that day's rate but the customs rate for that calendar month, set before the month begins.

That means a declaration can use a rate that is correct in itself — the ECB rate for that day — and still be wrong, because it should have been the monthly one.

This error works twice, because the customs value is the base both for the duty and for the import VAT. We do not add the two together: we count only the duty towards the overpayment, because import VAT is in most cases deductible and is not your loss. The VAT discrepancy is shown separately, as a question of the declaration's correctness.

And the most important difference: overpaid duty is refunded under a customs procedure whose time limit is three years. The time limit for disputing a carrier's margin is contractual, and often only weeks.

That is why we start the audit with customs declarations: there the individual amount is larger and the window is longer.

The application to customs is filed by you or by your customs representative. We establish the case and prepare the grounds — the declarant in a customs procedure is a defined person, and that cannot be changed.

Customs audit

Why this is part of every module

Currency is present in all four modules: dollars on sea and air invoices, dollars and yuan on rail routes, zloty, kronor, forint and pounds in road tolls.

The check requires no additional documents from you — only the same invoices. That is why it is not a separate service with a separate price. It is part of every module.

Why these errors never end

Some errors disappear for good once corrected. A wrong CO2 class in a road toll system is a registration error: reclassify it, and next month's invoice is already correct.

An exchange rate does not work that way. It changes every day, and every new invoice is a new conversion. Even after the contract is changed, the clause has to be enforced every month.

That means currency findings are the only ones that enter the payback calculation for ongoing monitoring with nothing deducted at all.

Whether the rate the carrier applied is permitted at all is decided by the currency clause in your contract. We extract it with a verbatim quote in the contract clause review.

How we calculate the result and what we treat as checked is described in the methodology.