Calculator
What is a delivery you cannot prove actually worth?
Not what the goods cost. What it costs to have been right and not be able to show it. Put your own numbers in: nothing here is an industry average, and there is no email box at the end.
Your numbers
What that works out to
$202
a month, or $2,424 a year
Deliveries with something wrong
1.6 a month
4% of 40
Of those, not provable later
0.8 a month
50% of them, because nothing was recorded at the bay
Value you cannot get back
$160
assuming a tenth of the order value is affected
Time spent chasing
1.2 hours a month
45 minutes on each of 1.6
Cost of that time
$42
at $35 an hour
Every figure above came from a box you filled in. There is no industry average built into this, because no honest one exists: the percentages quoted around this subject trace back to nothing, and we are not going to add another. Why that matters here.
Why the record matters more than the count
Almost nobody loses this money to dishonesty. They lose it to a gap: the delivery is counted properly at the bay, and then the record of it is written hours later from memory, or never written at all. A record made at five o’clock says everything was fine, because that is what the end of a day feels like.
By the time an invoice arrives that does not match, the pallet has been broken down, the wrap is in a skip and the conversation becomes two people describing different memories. The goods were wrong either way. The only thing that changed is whether anybody can show it.
That is why the two cheapest habits are worth more than any software: count against the order rather than the packing slip, and photograph anything wrong before it comes off the vehicle. Between them they cover most of what makes a claim fail.
Questions
- What counts as a delivery you cannot prove?
- One where something was wrong, short, over, damaged or not what was ordered, and there is no record made at the time that would stand up later. No count written down at the bay, no photograph before the pallet was broken down, nothing noted on the carrier's paperwork. The goods may well have been wrong. What is missing is the evidence.
- Why does this calculator not use an industry average?
- Because there is not an honest one. Percentages about receiving losses circulate widely with no source anybody can produce, and repeating one would undermine everything else on this site. Every figure in the calculation is one you entered, and the assumptions that are ours are stated on the page rather than hidden in the arithmetic.
- Is the money actually recoverable?
- Some of it, and that is the point. A shortage recorded at the bay with a note on the carrier's paperwork is an administrative matter. The same shortage discovered three weeks later, with nothing written down, is a negotiation you will usually lose. The difference is not the goods, it is the record.
- What is the cheapest thing to change?
- Photograph every delivery as it stands before it is broken down, and count against the purchase order rather than against the packing slip. Thirty seconds each, no software required, and between them they cover most of what makes a claim fail.
Closing the gap without buying anything
Everything above works on paper. These are free, on the page, and need no account.
DockCount closes the same gap by making the record a by-product of counting the delivery rather than a job that follows it. The count, the photographs and the email to purchasing are one action, taken at the pallet.