If you ship parcels at any volume, your carrier invoices contain money that is owed back to you. Not as an exception — as a routine, structural part of how parcel billing works. The problem is that claiming it is tedious, time-bound, and easy to deprioritise. So most of it is never claimed.
Where the money leaks
The same handful of issues recur on almost every carrier account:
- Late deliveries. Most carriers guarantee a delivery window for express and time-definite services. When they miss it, the shipping charge is refundable — but only if someone notices and files within the claim window.
- Dimensional-weight errors. Carriers re-rate parcels based on their dimensions. A small, systematic measurement error, multiplied across thousands of parcels, becomes a large recurring overcharge.
- Surcharge creep. Fuel, residential, and address-correction surcharges change frequently and are rarely checked against the contract you actually signed.
- Duplicate charges. The same shipment, or the same surcharge, billed more than once.
None of these are dramatic on a single parcel. That is exactly why they survive: each one is small enough to ignore, and there are too many to chase by hand.
Why it goes unclaimed
Recovering refunds is real work, and it competes with everything else an operations team has to do:
The claim windows are short, the carrier portals are slow, and the evidence lives in three different systems. By the time you have proven one late delivery, ten more have aged out.
Spreadsheets help for a while, then collapse under volume. Carrier portals are built for one-off disputes, not systematic auditing. And the people who could do the work are the same people keeping shipments moving.
How Remitto recovers it
Remitto treats recovery as an automated pipeline rather than a manual chore:
- Ingest. Connect your carrier accounts; Remitto pulls shipments and invoices via API, invoice upload, or EDI.
- Audit. Detection engines check every shipment and invoice line against the service guarantee and your contracted rates.
- Review. Each finding becomes an opportunity with a full explanation and evidence — approve them individually, in bulk, or by rule.
- File and reconcile. Approved claims are filed in your name, tracked to resolution, and matched to the credit when it arrives.
You only pay a success fee on what is actually recovered. If we find nothing, you pay nothing.
This is the first post in a series on parcel-carrier billing and how to get back what you are owed. More to come.