Where it leaks
Unbilled accessorials and demurrage
Detention, demurrage, waiting time and other accessorials get worked but never keyed onto the invoice, so the finance data shows the invoice sitting below the agreed rate.
Rate-card and fuel surcharge mismatches
A job billed on an old or wrong rate-card, or a fuel surcharge that was never applied, goes out at a price nobody intended, and the shortfall stays invisible until someone reads the invoice against the rate card.
Short payments on queried lines
A customer disputes one accessorial and pays the invoice short, and at high volume the small unpaid balances are never chased or collected.
Duplicate charges and unapplied credit notes
The same leg or surcharge is billed twice across a busy ledger, then a credit note is raised but applied twice or not at all, leaving the account out of balance.
Failed Direct Debits and card collections
Collections that bounce on the due date are not always retried, so completed work stays unpaid until someone spots the gap.
Stopped recurring storage and contract charges
A regular warehousing or contracted haulage charge quietly stops being raised, and the missing recurring line is easy to lose among thousands of transactions.
The scale
Revenue leakage is commonly estimated at 1% to 3% of turnover. GoCardless data across around 55,000 businesses shows roughly 2.9% of Direct Debit payments fail, and in freight those small percentages compound at volume: on a logistics firm turning over £30m, 1% to 3% is roughly £300k to £900k a year, framed here purely as an illustration.
How it is found
LeakIQ reads your own invoices, payments and ledger data read-only, with no change to your systems, and with no implementation to sit through first.
Take the full guide with you
If you would rather see your own figure than an estimate, you can get a free read of where your revenue is leaking, with no obligation.
Common questions
How is revenue leakage different from bad debt or credit risk?
Bad debt is money a customer cannot or will not pay. Revenue leakage is money you earned and had every right to collect, but that slips out through under-billing, duplicate charges, short payments or failed collections before it reaches the bank. It is usually recoverable once you can see it.
We invoice from our TMS, so surely our billing is accurate?
A transport management system prices the job it is told about, but leakage happens in the gaps: an accessorial that was never keyed in, a fuel surcharge on an old rate, a payment that failed, a credit note applied twice. Reading the finance data end to end is what shows those gaps.
How quickly can we see our own number?
Because the check is read-only against your existing finance data with no system change, there is nothing to install and nothing to migrate, so the work is in getting us an export rather than in a project. One finance team found over £49,000 of leakage in their first month.
How is this different from an aged debtors report or a Power BI or Tableau dashboard?
An aged debtors report, or a dashboard in Power BI or Tableau, shows what is already on your ledger: invoices you raised that have not been paid. Revenue leakage is the money that never reached the ledger correctly in the first place, under-billed, never invoiced, or failed on collection and never chased, so it usually never appears on a debtors report at all. That is what this audit looks for.
Keep reading
- How LeakIQ works for Logistics and freight
See it applied to your systems, not just the theory.
- What revenue leakage is
The plain definition, and why earned revenue slips before the bank.
- Revenue leakage in every other sector
The same field guide for facilities, waste, logistics, security and more.
