Straight answers

The Transport Cost Audit: a full 12 months of carrier invoices, every line run through the Audity 23-Point Reconciliation against your contracted rates, delivered as a findings report and a ready-to-lodge claim schedule. Not a sample — the whole year. The Warehouse Cost Analysis is a separate fixed-fee engagement, and your transport report tells you whether it’s worth commissioning.

No. Recovering billing errors is business as usual — carriers process these claims every week. Structural recommendations are yours to implement as you choose, and good carriers respect a customer who knows their numbers.

Roughly two hours if I run the claim: one to gather invoices and rate cards, one to walk through the findings. I do the rest. If you’d rather lodge the claim yourself, add a few hours for the back-and-forth with your carrier.

Anything from $50K a year upwards. The sweet spot is $250K to $5M, where 3–8% is real money and nobody internally has time to check it — but I will look at a $50K account, because a small leak is still your money and everyone starts somewhere. Wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and ag businesses anywhere in Australia. Because the audit works off your paperwork rather than your premises, a client in Perth gets exactly the same review as one down the road.

We agree a documented baseline — your current rates, adjusted for volume and fuel movements — before anything is implemented. Savings are measured against it, like for like, and you see every calculation.

Your invoices are seen by one person — me. Nothing is outsourced, nothing is offshored, and no third-party platform ever touches your data. The recalculation runs on my own machine, on tooling I built, and the results are reviewed by me before anything reaches you or your carrier. Files sit in encrypted storage in Sydney, are used only for the audit, and are deleted at the end of the engagement on request. A mutual NDA before anything is exchanged is standard.

Only from results, and the number is 30% of the money your carrier actually returns — not 30% of what I claim, 30% of what lands. It comes out of the recovery itself, so there is nothing to approve, no purchase order and no budget line to find. If the audit finds nothing recoverable, you never see an invoice. The audit is, quite literally, funded by your carrier’s billing errors.

Some lines get pushed back — that is normal, and it is why the claim schedule is built the way it is. Every line ties to a named invoice, a line number and the specific contract clause it breaches, so most disputes are settled on the evidence rather than argued. Where a carrier genuinely holds its position, I will tell you plainly whether it is worth pursuing. I am paid a share of what actually lands, so I have no interest in inflating a claim that will not stand up.

Your choice. Some clients take the schedule and lodge it themselves — it is built to be submitted as it stands. Others would rather I ran it, in which case I deal with the carrier directly and chase the credit notes through to payment. Hand it over and your involvement stays at roughly two hours; keep it in-house and budget a few more for the back-and-forth.

Five families of 3PL charges: storage (including free-period compliance), handling in and out, pick/pack rates, ancillary charges like shrink wrap and labelling, and minimum-volume or management fees — every line rebuilt from what actually happened and checked against your rate card and SLA. That includes a sweep of every vague ‘miscellaneous’, ‘general’ or ‘admin’ line, and anything that’s a cost of running the 3PL’s site rather than servicing your account: no contractual basis, no charge. It’s a fixed fee, quoted after a short scoping call, and your free transport report includes a preliminary read on your warehouse exposure so you can see whether it’s worth commissioning before you spend a dollar.