Guides & Education

Freight invoices contain numerous variables — contracted rates, freight classifications, fuel surcharges, and accessorial charges — that make billing errors common and difficult to detect, often resulting in silent overpayments across large shipment volumes. The most frequent error types include misclassifications, carrier reweighs, duplicate billing, quote-to-invoice mismatches, and recurring accessorial charges that signal underlying operational inefficiencies. A strong audit process validates every invoice against shipment records, contracted rates, and supporting documentation rather than simply checking whether totals appear reasonable. Automated freight auditing tools like +PAY by Lojistic improve on manual review by applying consistent standards across all shipments continuously, surfacing cost patterns that inform carrier negotiations and operational improvements beyond just recovering overcharges....

Parcel spend management is the ongoing process of tracking, auditing, and optimizing small parcel shipping costs across carriers, contracts, and surcharge programs — going well beyond simple invoice payment. Key cost drivers include surcharge creep, zone inflation, carrier diversification complexity, and contract terms that are negotiated but never enforced, all of which can cause spend to rise gradually without triggering obvious alerts. Effective programs combine automated invoice auditing, continuous accessorial analysis, and centralized carrier data to identify billing errors and operational inefficiencies before they compound. Shippers that build structured parcel spend management programs gain both immediate cost recoveries and long-term strategic leverage through better data for carrier negotiations and operational decisions....

Effective May 19, 2025, UPS will implement a new Payment Processing Fee—equal to 2% of all invoice charges. This change also marks the official end of the short-lived Credit Card Surcharge, which is being retired in name, but not in effect......

Read this to see how to set up and record freight costs for accounting, as well as what makes freight accounting different from accounting in other fields....