The Hidden Costs of Shipping: Unpacking Accessorial Charges

When it comes to parcel and freight shipping, most companies focus on the big-ticket items: carrier rates, delivery speed, and volume discounts. But there’s a quieter, often overlooked line item that can quietly chip away at your shipping budget: accessorial charges.

Accessorial fees are the sneaky little extras that show up on your invoices, often without explanation or warning. They're not always obvious, but over time, they add up—sometimes significantly.

What Are Accessorial Charges?

Accessorial charges are additional fees imposed by carriers like UPS and FedEx for services beyond standard pickup and delivery. These include things like:

• Address correction fees
• Residential delivery surcharges
• Saturday delivery fees
• Oversized package surcharges
• Fuel surcharges
• Delivery area surcharges (DAS)
• Declared value charges

While each fee may seem small on its own, they can snowball fast—especially if you're shipping thousands of packages a month.

Why You Should Care

Accessorial fees often go unnoticed because they appear as generic or coded line items. If your accounting or logistics team isn’t digging into the details of every invoice, you could be losing thousands without realizing it.

Here’s the kicker: many of these charges are preventable, negotiable, or even refundable—if you know what to look for.

How to Identify and Control Accessorial Costs

1. Audit Your Invoices Regularly Manual or automated invoice audits can reveal patterns in how and where these charges occur. Late delivery refunds get a lot of attention, but accessorial fees are the stealthy money leaks.
2. Validate Addresses Before Shipping Address correction fees are one of the most common (and preventable) charges. A quick validation tool integrated into your checkout or order system can eliminate these entirely.
3. Know Your Shipping Zones and DAS Areas Some ZIP codes are more expensive to ship to. Carriers impose additional fees for remote or high-cost delivery areas. Knowing where your customers are can help you better anticipate these costs—or pass them along.
4. Negotiate These Fees With Your Carrier Many businesses don’t realize they can negotiate these fees as part of their carrier agreement. You can often secure discounts or caps on the most frequent charges.
5. Use a Shipping Audit Partner (like RCS Audit) If tracking all of this manually sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. Our platform automates this process, detects irregular charges, recovers refunds, and provides full visibility into where your money is actually going.
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Bottom Line: Small Charges, Big Impact

Accessorial fees may seem minor, but they can quietly eat into your margins if left unchecked. The good news? With the right tools and strategies, you can track, reduce, and even eliminate many of these charges.

Want to see how much you could be saving? Let’s talk.

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