How to read a courier invoice without losing an afternoon
Logistic fee, fuel surcharge, disruption adjustment, GST. What each line is, which ones are negotiable, and how to reconcile them against what you were quoted.
A courier invoice is not designed to be reconciled. Charges arrive as separate lines, sometimes on separate dates, and the parcel they belong to is identified by an AWB you have to look up. Here is what the lines mean.
Logistic fee
The base freight for the billed weight slab. This is the number your rate card quotes and the only line you can meaningfully negotiate. Check it against the slab, not against the parcel's actual weight.
Fuel and disruption surcharges
A percentage applied on top of base freight, revised periodically. It is real, but it should be a published percentage rather than a number that appears without explanation. Ask for the schedule.
GST
18% on the pre-tax subtotal. It applies after every other charge, so a surcharge you did not expect also inflates the tax line. If the GST figure does not equal 18% of the sum of the lines above it, something is missing from the invoice.
Reconcile one shipment end to end before you reconcile a month. If a single parcel does not add up, the month never will.
Why the ledger here looks different
ShipGoPick writes one wallet entry per shipment with the components attached to it, rather than one entry per charge. You can expand any entry to see the base freight, surcharge and GST, and there is a flat view that restores line-item parity when you do need to tick off a courier invoice line by line. The ledger is append-only: corrections are reversing entries, never edits.
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