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Pre-billing revenue audit checklist

A 12-point checklist your billing team can use today to find revenue that falls through the cracks between dispatch and invoicing.

Billing teams miss charges for a structural reason: the people who know about detention, layover, and TONU events are in dispatch, and the people who build the invoice are not. Anything that happens at the dock after the rate confirmation is signed has to travel from a driver note into the shipment file. That handoff is where revenue leaks.

The checklist walks through the five places those charges typically sit uncaptured: detention and layover events, TONU situations, lumper fees paid and never rebilled, rate and fuel discrepancies against the confirmation, and missing accessorial documentation. Run it against your last 20 invoiced loads. One missed charge means you have a measurable gap worth fixing.

It is the same review structure our pre-billing audit team uses before an invoice goes out, condensed to a printable page.

What you'll check:

  • Rate confirmation vs. carrier invoice validation
  • Detention and layover charge documentation
  • Cancelled dispatch charge capture
  • Lumper fee passthrough to shipper invoice
  • Contract rate discrepancy detection
  • Duplicate invoice flags
  • Accessorial charges entered after rate con
PDF | 4 pages | Print-ready

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What is inside the checklist

  • The 5 revenue categories that leak most: detention, layover, TONU, lumper fees, and rate discrepancies, with the documentation each one needs
  • The rate confirmation match: 6 fields to verify before any invoice goes out
  • POD verification standards: what makes a POD billable vs disputable
  • An accessorial documentation table: charge type, required backup, and who provides it
  • A weekly audit cadence you can run with existing staff

The checklist is the self-serve version of the pre-billing revenue audit our teams run on every load. The full process breakdown is in the pre-billing audit guide.

One checklist, every freight type

The checklist applies the same pre-billing discipline to every mode: LTL, flatbed and heavy haul, cold chain, reefer, drayage, intermodal, tanker, and white-glove freight. Detention, layover, TONU, lumper fees, and accessorial charges leak the same way in all of them. Whether you need an LTL freight audit checklist or a heavy freight audit checklist, the charge types change and the discipline does not.

Frequently asked questions

Who is this checklist for?

Billing managers and owners at freight brokerages, 3PLs, and carriers who bill shippers directly. If your operation invoices freight, the checkpoints apply.

Yes. The checklist is process-level. It defines what to verify, not which buttons to click, so it works in McLeod, Aljex, Tai, Turvo, MercuryGate, or spreadsheets.

Industry benchmarks put uncaptured revenue at 2-5% of billings without a structured pre-billing audit. The checklist exists to close that gap. Results depend on volume and how consistently the audit runs.