Revenue leakage rarely arrives as one big mistake. It disappears through small gaps between buying, operations and billing.
Freight forwarders spend a lot of time negotiating rates. Yet some of the most damaging margin loss does not come from a bad buy rate. It comes from a charge the company incurred, earned the right to recover and never invoiced.
That risk rises when markets move quickly. Freightos’ September outlook reported bunker fuel around 60% above pre-war levels as Middle East tensions pushed crude prices higher. Reuters also reported sharp increases in war-risk and insurance costs for some cargo moving through the Strait of Hormuz. When carrier, fuel, insurance, handling and routing costs change quickly, a quotation made yesterday can be commercially wrong today.
Now take a Mumbai-Dubai shipment. The customer accepts the original quote. After booking, the carrier adds a surcharge. The truck waits longer than planned. A container loses free time. The destination agent adds another handling cost. Operations knows about each event because it has to get the cargo delivered. Finance may see the vendor bills later. But unless the commercial side of the job changes at the same time, some of those costs may never reach the customer invoice.
| “Nobody has stolen the money. Margin has leaked through small gaps between quotation, operations, buying and billing.” |
This is why revenue leakage should be treated as an operating control issue, not only a finance issue. The job should continuously compare what was quoted, what is expected to cost, what has actually been costed, what has been billed and what remains unbilled. The comparison matters before the shipment is closed, not at month-end when the loss has already happened.
The same control should catch ordinary errors. Wrong currency. Wrong customer tariff. Missed surcharge. Duplicate vendor cost. Incorrect tax treatment. Free days entered wrongly. A destination charge forgotten because the person who normally remembers it was on leave. These are not dramatic failures. They are routine leaks that become serious when multiplied across thousands of jobs.
Integration is the first defense. Buying cannot be separate from quotation. Operations cannot be separate from billing. A cost change should carry its commercial meaning with it. If a carrier surcharge changes the expected margin, the system should show that impact at the job level and decide whether customer approval, revised billing or management review is needed.
AI can strengthen this without turning the process into a black box. It can compare similar jobs and flag a charge that normally appears but is missing. It can detect an unusual cost. It can find a tariff condition that was not applied. It can propose a charge or hold job closure until an exception is reviewed. That is more useful than an AI assistant that only answers questions after the loss has occurred.
There is also a management benefit. Once leakage is captured properly, patterns become visible. Which customers generate the most unbilled costs? Which trade lanes have the biggest quote-to-actual gap? Which branches lose margin through storage or waiting? Which charge heads are repeatedly missed? The company can fix the cause instead of explaining the result.
Forwarders will always need good buying. But in a volatile market, protecting margin is also about making sure the company bills what it has earned, catches mistakes before closure and does not depend on one person remembering every exception. The best margin improvement may not come from negotiating another $20 from the carrier. It may come from billing the $20 you already earned.
Amit Maheshwari is the CEO of Softlink Global. He built Logi-Sys, a freight platform now used in over 50 countries. With 30 years in the industry, he focuses on fixing operational bottlenecks through software. He writes “IT in Logistics” for PortCalls Asia to cut through the tech hype and address the reality of moving cargo.
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