Courier COD payment reconciliation in Pakistan

A parcel is booked, delivered, and the rider hands the cash in at the courier's branch. Days or weeks later the courier runs a payment: it gathers the delivered parcels since the last run, adds up the COD, subtracts shipping, GST on shipping, any return charges, and the tax it withholds for FBR, and transfers the net to your bank. The document that describes that transfer is the payout receipt. Every courier calls it something different: PostEx a Cash Payment Receipt, TCS an invoice on a weekly running account, Leopards an invoice with a cheque number, M&P a payment report, Trax a payment id.

Two things make the receipt hard to trust. First, it is the courier's list of what it chose to pay, so a delivered parcel that never made it onto a receipt is invisible unless you have your own list to compare against. Second, a parcel's charges and its COD do not always land on the same receipt: TCS and Trax bill the freight in the week a parcel was booked and pay the COD in the week it was delivered, so one parcel is on two documents and a return is on two as well, with nothing collected.

• Missed on the receipt. The parcel is delivered on the trail and absent from every payout. This is the largest category by rupees in the stores ShipOps has audited: 20 parcels worth ₨68,210 in one 30-day window on one store.
• Short-paid. The parcel is on the receipt with less COD than the order. Sometimes the customer paid less at the door, sometimes a row was keyed wrong, sometimes an amendment to ₨0 was made and never explained.
• Delivered, nothing collected. A delivered row with ₨0 COD on a cash order. Either the rider delivered without collecting, or the order was prepaid and the courier's record is right. ShipOps treats the first as a claim to raise, and knows the second from your store.
• Returned but charged like a delivery. A return carries forward shipping, return shipping and GST and no COD. That is expected. A return that also shows a deduction a delivery would carry, or appears twice, is not.
• Paid twice or deducted twice. The same parcel on two receipts, or a withholding line applied on both the freight invoice and the COD payout. Rare, but when it happens it repeats every week until someone notices.

Export your delivered orders for the period with order number, tracking number and COD amount. Get every payout receipt the courier issued in the period, plus the one after it, because the last week's deliveries pay out next week. For each receipt, match every row to a tracking number; any order that matches nothing is missed. For each matched row, compare collected COD with the order's COD; any gap is short. Separate shipping, GST and withholding tax into their own columns so you can see what is a charge and what is tax. Repeat weekly, because a parcel missing this week may be paid next week and the one after that is the one to chase.

That is roughly four hours a week for a store doing a few hundred parcels, and the error rate is what you would expect from pasting fourteen-digit numbers between spreadsheets. It is the job ShipOps was built to replace.

ShipOps already holds every parcel from your store with its courier trail. It reads the courier's payout receipts, from the API where the courier has one and from the statement you drop in where it does not, and matches every line to a parcel. The settlement dashboard then maps every rupee of COD to one of three places: in your bank, owed by the courier, or at risk, with the parcels behind each number one tap away. Short-paid, missed, zero-collected and double-deducted parcels come out as a list with the receipt number and the trail, ready to send to your account manager. Returns are priced from the receipts they land on, so the cost of an RTO is a real figure, not a guess. Withholding tax is itemised on its own.

The money never touches ShipOps. The courier still pays your bank. What changes is that you know, every week, what should have been on the receipt and was not.