Cost to Serve
Cost to serve: see which customers and routes drive freight costs
- Road78%
- Air6%
- Parcel16%
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The analysis
What does the Cost to Serve analysis break down?
Review senders and receivers separately, grouped by company, city or country. Compare shipment counts, invoiced freight spend, cost per shipment and cost per kilogram. Break down the selection by carrier, transport mode and month, then inspect the relationships between sending and receiving locations.
The analysis is prepared with Intellyse from the data available for your company. It is not a promise of a self-service screen enabled for every account. We agree the scope and deliverables with you before presenting the results.
| View | What it helps you investigate |
|---|---|
| Sender or receiver | Which locations or counterparties account for the spend and shipments. |
| Unit costs | Where cost per shipment or kilogram differs from the rest of the selection. |
| Monthly development | Whether spend and unit costs change with the shipment mix. |
| Sender–receiver relationship | Which connections drive cost and the shipments behind them. |
The cost basis
Which charges and weights enter the calculation?
The spend basis is freight plus surcharges in your reporting currency, net of cancellations. Tax, duty and customs charges are excluded from this freight-cost measure. Total spend is divided by the shipment count for cost per shipment.
Cost per kilogram uses only shipments with a usable weight and the spend belonging to those shipments. Missing weight must not make a rate look lower. Chargeable weight is preferred where available; the calculation otherwise uses the available kilogram metric according to the analysis rules.
Names and coverage
Can you identify every customer from a carrier invoice?
Only when the source data supports it. Where the invoice prints a company name, the analysis normalises spelling and legal-form variations and keeps the country as part of the identity. If no company name is available, it falls back to the location rather than inventing a customer.
The coverage of company names and weights matters when interpreting the result. A location-based row is not automatically a named customer, and an invoice-based freight analysis is not a complete customer-margin or product-profitability calculation.
Useful comparisons
How can you investigate a high cost to serve?
Compare counterparties by total spend, cost per shipment or cost per kilogram. Examine monthly development and the carrier and mode mix before assuming that a high unit cost means an overcharge. A small shipment, a different service or a remote destination can explain a difference.
Sender–receiver views show where the money flows through the network. Rankings and concentration views help prioritise investigation; the underlying shipment detail is what makes the comparison explainable.
From result to source
Can you trace a result and take it into Excel?
Open the shipments behind a sender, receiver or relationship to inspect dates, references, invoices, carrier, mode, weight and spend. Links back to the invoice and shipment provide the source context for a finding rather than leaving you with an unexplained chart.
The Excel export includes the analysis tables and their cost basis for further review. Confirm the grouping and source-data coverage alongside the figures when using the output for procurement or operational decisions.
Start with your data
What do you need to prepare the analysis?
Start with carrier invoices and the shipment details they contain. Consistent sender and receiver information improves counterparty analysis; usable weights improve weight-based comparisons. Where these fields are absent, we explain which location or spend views remain meaningful.
We scope the analysis and the period with you. We do not assume that every company has customer, product or revenue mappings already in place, and we do not present incomplete invoice history as a complete view of the business.
Find out what your invoice data can explain about cost to serve.
Start with a Freight X-Ray on one month of carrier invoices. We review the available shipment, location and cost data and agree the analysis that it can support.
Guides on this topic
How the charges behind this work, what to check on a carrier invoice, and what our audits find.
