Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the process of aligning data and pricing records with the bills you receive from your carrier.

Noviship is a comprehensive management system and therefore covers not just the real-time customer interactions but also the financial aspect: billing customers. There are two parts to the billing process in Noviship, which are reconciliation and invoicing. Here we will introduce the reconciliation part.

What is Reconciliation?

Reconciliation is the process of determining what was actually spent on courier services and correlating that information with what you charge your customers. This quick example illustrates the somewhat hidden complexity of courier reselling financials.

Imagine one of your customers books two shipments to send some number of widgets to an address in another country. She describes the two boxes as 10” by 10” by 10” at 80lbs each. However after printing the labels, during packing, she discovers the contents are smaller than she thought so she puts all the widgets in one box. She also forgets to void the other label.

As you can see, several anomalies have taken place:

1. Failing to void a label is treated differently amongst the carriers. Some begin the billing progress on the same day as the shipment is booked to reduce billing time. This means you will be charged for that waybill.

2. The weight has changed significantly, resulting in the invoiced price being higher than the quoted price.

3. The new total weight is 160lbs which is above the threshold at which many carriers charge exceptional package weight fees. These would have been quoted but are now going to appear unexpectedly on your invoice.

So there are three ways the price will change when the bill arrives. In some cases these bills will even come in at different times.

To further complicate matters, some time later you may be billed for the duties and taxes levied on the shipment as it crossed the border. Even if you require recipients to pay for duties on delivery, it is not unusual for customers to default on payment leaving you liable.

We call the process of addressing all these issues Reconciliation.

How Noviship supports reconciliation

Without Noviship, billing these customers is a complex and time consuming process. Not only do you need to match these charges to the correct customers, you also need to work out how these adjustments translate into customer prices.

Digital Billing (EDI)

Although Noviship supports completely manual reconciliation, most users will want to automatically process courier provided billing documents. We do this by supporting various file formats that the carriers use.

The system will match billed shipments to existing records and unrecognized shipments can be (optionally) imported for billing.

For matched shipments, the system will compare the expected pricing data to the actual data and, if necessary, prepare a Correction.

Corrections

A correction is a record that describes a change from the previous pricing state to a new one. This pricing state is comprised of the shipment weight, the cost (base freight and surcharges), the derived reseller and customer prices and the list price.

You have the ability to review the corrections and decide what action to take, which are:

1. Cancel the correction (basically ignoring any changes represented by the new data)

2. Approve the correction, resulting in the customer being charged any adjustments as well as updating your cost records.

3. Billing as Quoted. With this option you approve the cost changes but do not apply these changes to the customer pricing.

Of course none of these actions preclude you from manually changing the pricing data.

Importing Shipments

When the system encounters an unrecognized tracking number, the shipment is treated as an Imported Shipment. If you wish, you can bring these shipments in to the system and bill them out.

This leads to the problem of determining which customer the shipments belong to. The system provides various tools to assist and simplify this process which we call Assignment.

Flagged Shipments

When a shipment is Flagged it means there is some ongoing issue with the shipment that must be resolved before it can be invoiced to a customer. Note that only customer invoices are affected. You can post flagged shipments to cost invoices. To prevent that you need a special Cost Flag.

When you attempt to invoice a customer for a flagged shipment, the system will refuse and identify the problem shipment. You must then resolve the shipment by either removing the flag, re-assign the shipment or remove it from the billing queue.

Flag a shipment to ensure it is reviewed before billing. For example, if a customer is unable to void a shipment that wasn't picked up they may want you to ensure they are not charged.