Calculate transport costs in times of boom and economic crisis

Transport costs are the value in a specific currency that is billed by a shipping company to a shipper for the provision of a transport service. The freight costs are only part of the total transport costs.

To put it directly: there is no uniform formula for calculating transport costs. Freight forwarders usually send their offers as PDF documents to their customers, the senders. The offers usually differ in the types of services and in the calculation logic of the individual items. The offers can often only be prepared by specialist personnel in a manual process and "translated" into a comparable form using a uniform logic. How good the quality of the result of this process is often depends on the skills of the individual.

Unfortunately, calculating the transport costs with Excel does not differ from other manual processes. The process is quite prone to errors because values ​​have to be copied manually from emails and PDF documents and pasted into Excel templates. These templates also have to be continuously adapted manually to new terms or changed cell references. Unfortunately, these errors are often not immediately apparent and, as a result, calculations are incorrect and, in the worst case, lead to very expensive wrong decisions. Handover of vacations and activities within a team also creates problems, since the complex manual processes are often carried out by a single person and the details cannot be reproduced by the colleagues. Especially in critical situations, this can lead to incorrect calculation of transport costs and correspondingly expensive errors.

In many companies, transport costs are not only calculated in shipping and logistics, but also in sales. It is important to calculate the share of transport costs in the total costs of a product. This not only creates duplicate work in different departments, but also the errors in sales described above can happen again. With incorrect product price calculations, this can quickly lead to financial damage in the five-digit range for the companies. Alternatively, it is worth thinking about calculating transport costs for pallets, transport costs by container ship or air freight with the aid of a system.

Especially in long-term offers, prices are often only offered for a specific unit, e.g. costs per shipment, package, kg or container, to name just a few examples. How much a specific shipment costs, taking into account the package dimensions and the weight of the shipment, is not directly apparent from the offer. So, based on the general offers, companies have to calculate the shipping costs for each individual transported shipment and compare this value with the costs charged by the shipping company. If the values ​​do not match, companies should have the invoice corrected if necessary and thus secure liquidity for their company. In the meantime, the competitive pressure for companies is permanently high, however, especially in times of economic downturn, senders should be careful to secure liquidity. You can do this, on the one hand, by selecting freight forwarders with transport costs in line with the market, but on the other hand, through detailed billing control. Both measures are based on a correct calculation of the transport costs.

Correctly calculating transport costs and at the same time achieving transport costs per pallet, container or shipment in line with the market is an absolute necessity for companies. However, this should not be confused with "price pressing" at the expense of transport quality. High transport quality is important to keep the supply chain stable and to keep customers happy over the long term. Transport quality and the correct calculation of transport costs are not in conflict with each other, but are linked.