DCL Logistics invoice audit

DCL Logistics does not publish a price list. Its prices are set per customer, and the freight rates DCL charges you sit in a rate card it builds for your account inside eFactory. What DCL does publish is the machinery of its billing: how the monthly invoice is built, which fees land on which lines, and how freight is billed twice a month. That machinery is detailed enough to check an invoice against. Below is what DCL's own help center says, as published when we checked in November 2026, and the checks that follow from it. Your contract and your eFactory rate card win over anything here.

What DCL publishes about its billing

The fulfillment invoice has a fixed skeleton. You are billed monthly for fulfillment. The invoice arrives as a PDF summary, with a detailed Excel backup stored in eFactory, and DCL publishes which fee sections land on which numbered lines:

Section	What it covers	Invoice line
1.1 Order Processing	Receiving and processing an order	1 (Other-Fulfillment items: 2)
1.2 Pick Fees	Individual pick, closed carton pick, pallet pick	3 (Other-Fulfillment items: 4)
1.3 Other Fulfillment Fees	Serial Number Capture, International Order fees, Bill of Lading	5 (Other-Fulfillment items: 6)
2.0 B2B Fulfillment	Order consolidation, labeling, third-party transactions, manual bill of lading	7
3.1 Warehouse Storage	Pallet storage by region, RMA storage, slow-moving item fees	10
3.2 Receiving Fees	Receiving pallets and cases, receiving interventions, devanning by container size	10
4.0 Reverse Logistics	RMA processing, blind returns, undeliverables, additional labor	11
5.0 Technology	eFactory and ReturnTrak licenses; IT labor	12; IT labor on 13
5.1 EDI Services	EDI fees; the Monthly Retailer Fee	15; retailer fee on 14
6.0 Assembly	Assembly projects, charged at an hourly rate	16
7.0 Other Fees	Monthly minimum charges, account management, project management, outside services	Each on its own line
8.0 Materials	Materials used for shipping; materials used for assembly	21; assembly on 22
9.0 Freight	Base freight, freight adjustments, return freight	23–25

Freight runs on a different clock. Fulfillment is monthly; freight is billed twice a month. The first half is billed on its own, and the second half is folded into the monthly fulfillment invoice. In the invoice backup, freight appears on a tab DCL calls 9.0FRT$, as one line per class rather than per order, under three codes: GF01 for freight charges (the discounted base charges), GF02 for additional charges such as delivery area surcharges, fuel and address corrections, and GF03 for return charges. DCL states that the 9.0FRT total matches the total of the freight invoice you can download from eFactory for the same period.

The freight detail has its own fee names. In eFactory (Services → Administration Tasks → Invoices → Freight Charges), each order's freight is broken into a transportation charge, a fuel charge, a delivery area surcharge, a residential fee, a signature required fee, a peak surcharge, government charges, and two categories that matter for audits: adjustment charges and residential adjustment charges, each defined as the balance of fees from a past carrier invoice for the same shipment. DCL's own FAQ explains why they exist: carriers typically invoice a week or two after delivery for domestic shipments, and up to several months later for international ones.

SelectShip prices by weight, not by zone — with one exception. For domestic parcel orders, DCL's SelectShip platform assigns the carrier and service itself, under service levels defined by transit time: Standard at 7 business days or less, Expedited at 3 or less, 2 Day, and Next Day. Pricing is a zone-agnostic flat rate by weight, which assumes the order ships from the lowest-zone DCL node in your footprint. When a shipment instead leaves a node whose zone to the destination is higher than the lowest available, a Non-Optimal Node Fee may apply. The fee schedule is set per customer; DCL does not publish the amounts.

You also pay per software seat. Every DCL customer gets eFactory, but the Basic license is free while the Standard license carries a monthly user fee set in your contract, and ReturnTrak, DCL's returns system, is a separate license again. These land on the Technology line of the invoice.

Disputes are pay-first. DCL's published position is that if you dispute a specific charge, the remaining balance is paid in full while the charge is reviewed, and an unpaid bill can suspend shipping and order management on the account. That order of operations is exactly why the checking has to happen before the due date, not after.

Nine things to check on every DCL invoice

1. Tie the 9.0FRT$ total to the eFactory freight download. DCL says the two totals match for the same period. Use the Billing Period column in eFactory to separate the first half of the month from the second, and confirm the standalone first-half freight invoice is not also sitting inside the monthly fulfillment total. The split cadence is where double-counting hides.

2. Rebuild each PDF line from the Excel backup. The PDF is a summary; the backup is the evidence. Every line should trace to backup rows in the section DCL assigns to it. Watch the spillover lines — Other-Fulfillment items from sections 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 appear on lines 2, 4 and 6 rather than with their sections — and line 10, where storage and receiving are combined into one number.

3. Open every adjustment charge. Adjustments collect in GF02 on the summary and appear as adjustment charges and residential adjustment charges in the freight detail. Each one is a carrier rebill against a shipment from an earlier invoice, so match it back to that shipment: it should be your shipment, adjusted once, for a reason the carrier actually charged. For residential adjustments, check the address and the order itself — DCL's Freight Guide warns that if the residential option is not coded when the order is entered, the additional charge is billed later.

4. Check the pick type, not just the pick count. Section 1.2 separates individual picks, closed carton picks and pallet picks, which carry different rates. An order that shipped as a full closed carton but was billed as individual picks multiplies the fee by the number of units in the carton. Sample a few orders each month and compare the pick type billed with how the order actually shipped.

5. Count Technology licenses against your real user list. Line 12 bills eFactory and ReturnTrak licenses. Standard licenses carry a monthly user fee and Basic is free, so the count should match your active users, at the level each person actually needs — someone who only enters orders through Orderpoints is covered by the free Basic license. Former employees and duplicate accounts are the usual leak, and ReturnTrak should only appear if you enabled it.

6. Pull line 10 apart into storage and receiving. Storage means pallet storage by region, plus RMA storage and slow-moving item fees; receiving means pallets and cases received, interventions, and devanning charged by container size. Check pallet counts against the inventory you actually held at each facility, slow-moving fees against the definition in your agreement, and devanning against the size of container that actually arrived. If a receiving intervention is billed, the backup should say what the intervention was.

7. Test every Non-Optimal Node Fee against its own condition. The fee applies only when the shipment left a node whose zone to the destination is higher than the lowest zone available within your footprint. For each fee, ask which node shipped the order, which node was the lowest-zone option, and whether that node held the stock. If the lowest-zone node had your inventory and the order still shipped from further away, the condition DCL publishes for the fee is not met.

8. Per-event fees should match events. Serial Number Capture belongs only on orders for SKUs that require serial capture, and International Order fees only on international orders. B2B fees on line 7 — consolidation, labeling, third-party transactions, manual bills of lading — belong only on retail and B2B orders, and the Monthly Retailer Fee on line 14 only if you run retailer programs. A DTC-only month with a line 7 charge is a question to ask.

9. Re-price freight after the annual rate change. Your rate card in eFactory is rebuilt each year around the carriers' January increases, and DCL says new rates are typically in eFactory by the first week of February; the card also states it excludes adjustments and surcharges. Download the current card, re-price a sample of shipments from the first invoices of the year, and confirm which version of the card priced them. Do the same for the monthly minimum in section 7.0: it is a top-up to the agreed minimum, so a month that already cleared the minimum should not carry it.

Have us check it

Upload your last three DCL invoices — the PDF summary and the Excel backup — plus your quote and the rate card export from eFactory. We check every line, mark each dollar with a status, and write the dispute letter for the amounts the checks prove. Your latest invoice is audited free.

We are independent and not affiliated with DCL Logistics.

To: DCL Logistics Billing & Account Management
Subject: Formal Billing Dispute – Invoice #[INVOICE_NUMBER] – [MERCHANT_NAME]
Date: [TODAY_DATE]

Dear DCL Logistics Billing Department,

Upon line-by-line reconciliation of invoice #[INVOICE_NUMBER] against our executed Master Services Agreement (MSA) and confirmed Rate Schedule dated [CONTRACT_DATE], we have identified [COUNT] billing discrepancies totaling $[TOTAL_OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT].

Summary of audited discrepancies:
1. [Line/Ref ID]: Billed [Rate/Service] at $[BILLED_RATE]. Agreed contract tier is $[CONTRACT_RATE]. Variance: $[OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT]. (Ref: Contract Section [SECTION_NUM])
2. [Line/Ref ID]: Unauthorized accessorial surcharge [NAME] of $[SURCHARGE_AMOUNT] billed without prerequisite contract triggers.
3. [Line/Ref ID]: Dimensional weight (DIM) billed at [BILLED_WEIGHT] lbs vs verified packaging volume of [ACTUAL_WEIGHT] lbs. Variance: $[DIM_OVERCHARGE].

Per our agreement, this dispute notification is formally submitted within the contractual dispute window. 

Please confirm receipt and apply a credit memo of $[TOTAL_OVERCHARGE_AMOUNT] to our account, or provide a revised invoice within 10 business days.

Sincerely,
[YOUR_NAME]
[MERCHANT_NAME]
[ACCOUNT_NUMBER / MERCHANT_ID]