Freight Variance Reporting

Freight variance reporting measures the gap between what you expected to spend on freight and what you actually spent. Variances can be tracked against multiple baselines: budgeted rates, contracted rates, tendered rates, or accrued estimates. Each comparison tells a different story – budget variance reveals forecasting accuracy, while rate variance against contract terms reveals carrier billing compliance.

A variance report typically breaks down deviations by category. Rate variances show where actual linehaul charges differed from contracted rates. Accessorial variances highlight unexpected charges – detention, liftgate, lumper fees – that weren't part of the original quote. Volume variances capture the impact of shipping more or fewer loads than planned. Fuel surcharge variances track whether the applied percentage matched the contracted index. Each category points to a different root cause and a different corrective action.

The real value of variance reporting is pattern recognition. A single detention charge is an incident. Detention charges spiking at a specific facility every Tuesday is a dock scheduling problem. Accessorial charges from one carrier running 40% above the network average is a billing practice that needs to be addressed in the next rate review. Without systematic variance tracking, these patterns hide inside thousands of individual transactions.

Effective variance reporting requires clean baseline data – accurate contract rates, consistent accrual estimates, and reliable shipment records to compare against. Shippers who invest in maintaining their rate data and auditing invoices consistently get dramatically more value from their variance analysis.