For forwarders and carriers
Revenue leakage audit
This part is for freight forwarders, carriers and logistics operators — those who buy a service and resell it.
Every other audit checks whether you paid too much. This one checks whether you invoiced too little. The difference is material: a recovered overcharge has a cost behind it, while an invoice never issued for a service already performed is pure margin.
A cost with no revenue line
The core of the audit is a simple operation: every cost line is matched against a revenue line.
A line with no match is one of three things: a service included in the agreed rate, a cost absorbed deliberately, or revenue nobody invoiced. Usually the company does not know which is which — not out of disorder, but because nobody has ever put the two sides side by side.
So the first step is not a search. The first step is to establish together with you which service types are included in the price and which are passed on. Without those rules the report would be a list in which most entries are legitimate.
A rule you do not confirm works against you — the cost is treated as included in the price, and no finding is produced. Better to miss a finding than to hand over a list in which half the entries are wrong.
The indexation nobody carried out
The contract provides for annual indexation — a fuel formula, a consumer price index, a change in road charges.
Carrying it out is often assigned to nobody in particular. And because it is not necessary for the work to continue, it does not happen. Two years later the contract is being performed at prices that should have risen twice.
We check this only when the clause has all three elements: the formula, the frequency and the notice period. Without even one of them indexation cannot be applied retroactively, and we say so plainly instead of presenting an amount with no basis.
What else we check
Surcharges that were never passed on. A fuel, security or terminal surcharge you received but that never appeared on your invoice. A road charge increase after new tariffs or tighter CO₂ classes.
Detention paid and not passed on. Detention paid to a carrier where the cause was on the cargo owner's side.
Weight on the sales side. If the airline charged you for 312 kg of chargeable weight and you invoiced your customer for 287 kg, those 25 kg are your loss. The same arithmetic we use on air invoices, in the other direction.
An old rate after the change date. And a minimum charge that was never applied.
Free time granted longer than the contract allows.
Exchange rate on the sales side. The price fixed in euro, the cost in dollars having risen.
Much of it will be too late — and that is the most important part
This has to be said plainly before, not after.
A historic leakage audit finds what has already leaked. Part of it will be too old or commercially unwise to invoice: an invoice for a service performed fourteen months ago may be technically possible, but issuing it costs relationship. A customer who receives an unexpected invoice for last year starts checking all the others.
That is why we separate the results into two types and never add them together:
Still invoiceable. The service is recent, the contractual deadline has not passed. This is money now.
Process fix only. Too old, or the deadline has passed. This is money going forward — and it is the larger part of the value.
Before the audit we ask you two things: what your contracts say about the invoicing deadline, and how many months back you are willing to invoice at all. The second number is your commercial decision, and we do not set it.
The real result is a mechanism, not a list
Leakage is a process, not an event. If reefer plug-in went unbilled in 34 cases out of 41, that is not 34 findings — it is one mechanism that can be fixed, and that will otherwise keep leaking every week.
So the report contains not only a list of cases but a list of mechanisms: which service type is systematically not billed, which indexation is not carried out, which operational record never reaches the invoice.
How you pay
For the historic part you choose between two models, as in all our services.
Success fee: 25 % of amounts actually collected, not of amounts found, and no more than 5 000 € per finding. If the amount collected is below 100 €, there is no fee at all.
Why on collected and not on found: you may decide not to invoice because of the customer relationship. That is a legitimate decision, and we cannot charge a fee on an amount you deliberately did not invoice. The practical consequence for you: this model requires you to report how much you actually received.
Or a fixed price: instead of the 25 % success fee — 1 490 € for the audited period, regardless of the result, and then there is nothing to report. For German customers only this option remains, because the success fee model may not be legally permissible there.
The process fix is priced separately at 1 490 €, because no money comes out of it and the value is going forward. The amount is the same as the fixed historic audit price, and that is not a mistake: these are two separate results, and they can be bought separately.
Your data
This audit needs the invoices you issued together with the cost side. Together they reveal your margin on every shipment and every customer — the most sensitive commercial data in a logistics company.
Therefore: this data is never used for any other customer's audit, it never enters any shared configuration layer, it is never aggregated into any market statistic, and its retention period is shorter than that of other documents — originals are kept 12 months, not 24, because their value ends when the audit ends.
The report speaks about processes, not about people
In a cost audit the mistake was made by the other side. Here part of the findings were created by your own staff.
The report speaks about processes and systems. There are no names in it. The credit note part — if you want it — is delivered separately, with a clear statement that this is a data discrepancy which an unrecorded instruction may well explain, not a suspicion.
Before the audit we agree who the report is addressed to. A report prepared for a director but reaching the department whose work it assesses damages both the audit and the relationship.
One thing we do not do
We cannot audit your revenue leakage and your customer's costs at the same time if that customer is also our customer. That would be work on both sides of the same documents.
Accepting a new client includes a check against the list of existing ones. If there is a conflict, we say so and decline.
Related
Contract clause review — the sales-side contract decides whether an invoice can still be issued.
Air freight invoice audit — the same weight arithmetic, in the other direction.
Audit modules — leakage is a process, not an event, so ongoing control is switched on per module.
Methodology — how we separate a finding, a candidate and „check not performed“.
Submit data for assessment
What is needed
- Your ISSUED invoices (required)
If you do not have it: Without the issued invoices this audit is IMPOSSIBLE to carry out: its whole point is matching the cost side against the revenue side, and with one side missing there is nothing to match. - Received invoices with a job reference (required)
If you do not have it: Without cost lines carrying a job reference the matching drops to an assumption, and we do not build a finding out of an assumption. - Operations or job list (preferred)
If you do not have it: Without them we will not find services that were performed but recorded on no invoice at all — neither on the cost side nor on the revenue side. In the report this will be stated as a check NOT PERFORMED, not as “no leakage found”.