If you already buy from carriers and invoice your own customers, the hard bit is rarely the invoice layout. It's getting the charges right without doing the arithmetic by hand every month.
Most parcel brokers already know how to raise an invoice. What takes the time is everything before that: the courier file, the customer rates, the surcharges, the lines that don't match, and the check that you're not billing the wrong amount.
Do it in a spreadsheet and the invoice is the last cell in a long chain of VLOOKUPs. Miss a weight break and the customer is under or over charged. One person usually owns the workbook. When they're away, invoicing waits.
You don't need a nicer-looking invoice. You need a way to turn courier billing data into customer charges, keep it organised, and produce an invoice you've actually looked at.
Import the billing data as it arrives and map the columns once. You're not retyping consignments into a template.
Charges come from that customer's pricing, not from a markup typed into the sheet that month. Fuel, POD and extra charges can go through in the same pass.
Look at the draft before anything is final. Change a line if you need to. Unmatched rates stay at £0, so you don't invoice a guessed figure. Then export the pack from your Excel template. Finance still gets a file they can open and send. Accounts stays where it is.
If every customer paid the same, invoicing would be the courier bill plus a percentage. That isn't how this market works.
One account might have a tight national rate and pay fuel. Another has a different zone structure, a higher weight break, or extra charges that should appear as their own lines. The invoice has to follow the commercial agreement, not the courier's layout.
That's why the billing software and invoicing belong together. The rate card that calculates the charge is the same record that ends up on the invoice.
Sending the file is easy. Standing behind every line is what takes time. A draft lets you see customer charges next to courier costs. Useful when a surcharge appears that nobody expected, or when a service name in the file doesn't match the rate card. You deal with it before the customer does.
If you also need to compare cost and charge more closely — unmatched rates, missing costs, consignments that make no money — that's courier invoice reconciliation. Different job from laying out the invoice.
Which file was the source? Which rate card applied? Why is this line different from last month? The answers live in someone's head, or in a workbook called something like FINAL_v7.
Courier Billing keeps the source file, the customer rates, the draft and the exported pack together. You still use Excel for the document the customer receives. You stop using it as the engine that calculates every line.
It takes the courier billing file, applies each customer's rates, and prepares the customer invoice. You review the charges first, then export a pack finance can send. It doesn't replace your accounts system.
Yes. Pricing sits on the customer. Service, zone, weight band, POD, fuel and extra charges can all differ by account.
An Excel invoice pack built from your template. You can still change a line in the draft before it goes out.
Billing is the wider job: costs, charges, margin, exceptions. Invoicing is the last stretch — a customer invoice you're willing to send. Courier Billing does both, which is why they have separate pages.
Book a demo and we'll walk through how your courier files become invoice packs you can actually send.