The shippers I speak with know I am particularly bullish on their ability to secure far more favorable shipping rates, terms, and conditions from FedEx and UPS right now. With excess capacity in their networks, both carriers are again eager to compete for business.
Many of our customers at Reveel are not only securing dramatically lower rates but also gaining important exceptions specific to their shipping profile, including heavily discounted surcharges and significantly altered dimensional weights and minimums. In negotiations, we see customers secure some of the most significant, business-changing concessions from carriers we have ever witnessed.
Recent industry developments have brought about another indication of the competitive edge that shippers are facing. In February 2025, FedEx reinstated its money-back guarantee for U.S. import shipments after a brief suspension, demonstrating how carriers are responding to market pressures and shipper demands for accountability. These moves reflect a broader shift back toward customer-focused service guarantees—a stark contrast to the pandemic era when carriers suspended guarantees industry-wide.
The tide has shifted, but as we all know, change is constant in our industry. To stay ahead and continue to optimize shipping costs, shippers need to focus on parcel shipping audits.
Parcel Shipping Audits Matter More Than Ever: Here’s Why
Even before we created Reveel’s Shipping Intelligence Platform and enabled shippers to gain real-time visibility and control over their shipping activity, a thorough parcel audit had the power to uncover significant savings.
Perhaps the most basic of all cost-saving measures, parcel shipping audits almost always uncover late deliveries in which the carrier failed to satisfy its own service-level guarantees. They also reveal charges that cost businesses thousands of dollars annually, including:
- Billing errors
- Incorrect surcharges
- Dimensional weight discrepancies
Regrettably, too many businesses leave subsequent refunds on the table. And if you are not religiously tracking your carrier’s performance, you are not only losing money, but likely are also impacting your own customer relationships. Late shipments reflect just as poorly on the sender as they do on the carrier.
What’s The Difference Between Parcel Audits, Invoice Audits, and Rate Audits?
You’ll often see these phrases used interchangeably, but they aren’t exactly the same. A comprehensive parcel audit has three distinct components, each serving a specific purpose in controlling your shipping costs:
Rate Audit
A rate audit is a comprehensive review of the accuracy of charges against your actual carrier agreements. During a rate audit, shipments are rerated to ensure they align with your negotiated rates and contractual terms. This process often reveals:
- Discrepancies between contracted rates and billed rates
- Incorrectly applied discounts or incentives
- Zone classification errors
- Minimum charge violations
- Opportunities for contract renegotiation based on actual shipping patterns
Rate audits are proactive and strategic, helping you ensure you’re getting the pricing you negotiated.
Service Audit
A service audit focuses on carrier performance against their service commitments. This includes identifying late deliveries where carriers failed to meet their money-back guarantees and guaranteed service refunds. Service audits track:
- Service failures or late deliveries that are eligible for refunds
- Patterns in carrier performance by lane, service level, or time period
- Money-back guarantee exceptions and suspensions
With carriers only issuing refunds upon request, systematic service auditing ensures you capture every eligible credit before claim deadlines expire.
Dispute windows: FedEx and UPS dispute windows are only 15 days, so these claims are extremely time sensitive.
Billing Audit
A billing audit examines accessorial charges and surcharges to identify incorrect or invalid fees. This includes catching:
- Manifested but not shipped packages
- Invalid address correction charges
- Incorrect residential surcharges
- Unauthorized Saturday delivery fees
- Duplicate charges and billing errors
Together, these three audit components provide comprehensive oversight of your parcel spend, ensuring accuracy at every level—from the rates you’re charged to the service you receive to the fees applied to each shipment.
The Hidden Cost of Unclaimed Refunds
The reality is that a significant amount of eligible refunds go unclaimed every year. Without systematic auditing processes, businesses routinely miss refund opportunities because:
- They lack visibility into carrier performance data
- Manual invoice review is too time-consuming for high-volume shippers
- Claim-filing deadlines pass before errors are identified
- They don’t realize certain charges are eligible for disputes
The financial impact adds up quickly. A business shipping 1,000 packages weekly could be leaving thousands of dollars per month on the table through unclaimed late delivery refunds alone—not to mention billing errors, incorrect surcharges, and dimensional weight mistakes.
Beyond the immediate financial loss, failing to track carrier performance means you can’t hold carriers accountable to the service levels you’re paying for. This creates a cycle where poor performance goes unchecked, costing you both money and customer satisfaction.
Is Your Parcel Spend Management Software Doing Enough?
Your parcel spend management software should be doing two things: saving you time and money. The question is whether your current solution is actually delivering on both fronts.
When it comes to audits, comprehensive automation makes all the difference. Reveel’s parcel audit solution uncovers 100% of the refunds you’re owed at no extra cost to you. Our platform continuously monitors every shipment, automatically identifying:
- Service guarantee failures and late deliveries
- Billing errors across all surcharge categories
- Rate discrepancies against your carrier contracts
- Dimensional weight and package characteristic errors
The combination of real-time monitoring, automated claim filing, and strategic insights transforms auditing from a reactive cost-recovery exercise into a proactive shipping optimization tool. You’re not just finding money you’ve already lost—you’re preventing future losses and making smarter shipping decisions based on comprehensive data. Request a demo with our team today!
