Freight Cost Control Checklist

Cost Visibility & Data Foundation

• All freight spend visible in one place — including freight buried inside supplier-delivered pricing, and what other departments book directly.
• Cost measured per unit of the thing you actually sell — per case, pallet, tonne, cubic metre or order — not only per shipment.
• Freight coded to lane, customer and product, so any cost can be traced back to a decision and an owner.
• Accessorials and surcharges tracked as their own line, not absorbed into a blended average that hides them.

Rate, Contract & Tender Integrity

• Contracted rates held somewhere a system can check them against — not in a spreadsheet, and not in one person's head.
• Rates tested against the market on a defined cycle, with a decision taken either way — not renewed by default.
• Enough carriers per lane to keep a real alternative, without so many that your volume commitments stop meaning anything.
• Surcharge mechanisms — fuel, currency, peak, security — defined by formula and published index, not left to the carrier to calculate.

Demand & Design

Where the cost is actually set — long before anyone negotiates a rate, and where most freight checklists stop.

• Order patterns reviewed for what they do to freight — minimum order values, order frequency and cut-off times set with transport cost in the room.
• Packaging and pallet configuration tested against the cube and weight you are actually being charged for.
• Incoterms and terms of sale chosen deliberately, with visibility of what the freight costs on both sides of the trade — not inherited from the first contract ever signed.
• Expedited and premium freight measured, attributed to root cause, and reported back to the function that caused it.

Invoice Accuracy & Recovery

• Invoices checked against contracted rates before payment rather than after, by rule rather than by sampling.
• Discrepancies logged with a reason code, so the same error stops recurring instead of being corrected again each month.
• Recovery tracked to conclusion — credits chased and closed out, not quietly written off when it gets tedious.
• Someone accountable for the gap between what was quoted, what was accrued and what was finally paid.

Mode, Load & Network

• Mode chosen against what the customer actually requires, not what the default ship-date assumes.
• Consolidation opportunities looked for across orders, sites and business units — not optimised inside each silo.
• Vehicle and container fill measured against a target, with a named owner for the empty space.
• Flow paths reviewed on a defined cycle — where stock sits and which site serves which customer — rather than fixed by history.

Carrier Performance & Relationship

• Performance measured on the terms that matter to your customer, not only the terms written into the contract.
• Performance data shared with carriers in a form they recognise — an argument about whose numbers are right kills every improvement conversation.
• Forecast and volume visibility shared far enough ahead that carriers can price and plan against it.
• Rewards and consequences that are actually applied — used in practice, not just drafted into the agreement.

Governance, Compliance & Accountability

• A named owner for freight cost with authority over the decisions that create it — not just responsibility for the invoice.
• Freight performance reviewed on a fixed cadence, with commercial, operations and finance in the same room.
• Customs classification and trade documentation reviewed as part of the cost picture — duty, demurrage and delay are freight costs too.
• Emissions measured alongside cost per shipment or per unit, so the trade-off is made deliberately rather than discovered later.