Logistics, unfortunately, can be expensive. The costs of doing business can sneak up without you even realizing it, even if you pride yourself on keeping a tight leash on your finances. It’s not unusual for businesses to find out they’re paying more than they should to keep their supply chain moving—a lot more.
Imagine this: the quarterly reports roll in and you notice that much more of your logistics budget is going toward shipping and freight costs than you or your logistics team anticipated. Your immediate response is to pore over your invoices and shipping records and find out where these costs are coming from, and there you find duplicate billings, misclassified shipments, and other issues that have slipped under the radar all this time and nickel-and-dimed your business.
No wonder your budget has been so tight. No wonder you’ve been losing sleep wondering where the money your business needs to keep up with the competition has been going. Fortunately, taking a good, hard look at what’s been going on under the hood has shown you where your logistics engine has been having performance issues and how it’s been costing you.
But how much can you really save on freight spend by tackling these issues? Are the cost savings you can get from a freight audit really enough to make a difference? Yes—and we can say that with confidence, knowing exactly how a good freight audit can lead to real cost savings.
Since 1975, TI Freight Audit has helped clients across industrial sectors, including Fortune 100 businesses, save time and money on their logistics. Every lost cent makes a difference, and thanks to our freight audits, some of our clients have reduced logistics costs by millions of dollars.
What are the real financial benefits of a freight audit?
Sometimes, here and there across your supply chain, people get a little careless and things slip past them. It’s not malice on anyone’s part—not your logistics team, not your carriers, not anyone else—but rather just an unfortunate fact of life. People make mistakes. Those mistakes have costs, and those costs can add up. But you can cut costs with a freight audit by:
- Catching and resolving billing errors such as duplicate charges, incorrect rates, and unauthorized services
- Keeping freight invoices accurate and in compliance with negotiated contracts to prevent overpayment
- Identifying past overcharges and recovering those costs
By catching and rectifying these issues, a freight audit can return some much-needed liquidity to your budget and give you back the resources you were supposed to have for other parts of your business—R&D, marketing, customer service, employee training and workforce development, and what-have-you. On top of that, you get detailed insights into how your carriers are performing that you can take to the negotiating table to get better rates and keep saving money.
On top of that, freight auditing doesn’t just correct pricing mistakes. Regularly auditing your logistics also reduces your need for administrative labor and can help you discover opportunities to improve your freight processes to save time and money.
Freight audits aren’t just things you need to do when you have a bad gut feeling about the financial health of your logistics department, either. Use them proactively and regularly, and you’ll keep reducing your logistics costs and improving your business’s financial health.
Finding Freight Audit ROI with Real Numbers
The average company can save between 5% and 10% of its annual freight costs through regular audits. Savings can reach as high as 15% or even 20% for large enterprises.
For example, when one of our clients started working with us, it only took around three months for our freight audits to turn up $925 million in recoverable duplicate and inaccurate billings. That’s right—within ninety days, they had nearly one billion dollars back in their war chest.
For another client, our first day on the job turned up a $2 million billing error by a major national bank that we could recover.
When a business seeks a partnership with a freight audit service for ongoing help with their freight spend, they typically see the biggest savings in their first year. A small business could recover 7% or 8% in its first year because there is usually a hefty backlog of logistics issues for its partner to go through. From the first year onward, that business will see a few percent per year because their regular audits are getting back money on freight errors quickly as well as preventing some of them from happening in the first place.
To calculate the ROI on a freight audit, just take the cost of performing that audit and compare it to the 2%, 8%, or 20% that audit has saved you that year. More often than not, you won’t be disappointed.
Get the Biggest Freight Cost Reduction with TI Freight Audit
You might not have almost a billion dollars locked away in freight errors and oversights, but you certainly have money that’s better spent elsewhere, and your business’s success is about making the most of what you have. The numbers don’t lie. You can see a real cost reduction through freight audits that will change how you do business.
When you partner with TI Freight Audit, you can count on us to always be there, working with your logistics team and auditing to the penny. Every day, we keep our eyes out for discrepancies and anomalies in your freight, fuel, and accessorial charges to:
- Protect you from duplicate payments
- Give back money you didn’t know you were spending
- Help you improve your relationships with your carriers
- Analyze your freight data and show you what’s really going on
- Save your logistics department’s valuable time
A partnership with TI Freight audit puts a magnifying glass to your freight spend and delivers agile, accurate, and reliable freight audits and analytics—and an ROI you won’t be disappointed in.
Find out what world-class freight audit and payment support can do for your business. .