Hive invoice audit

Hive publishes no price list. There are no public per-order, storage or delivery rates to check an invoice against: Hive's own blog says so outright, and every rate that matters - the delivery price by weight bucket, the hourly rate for manual tasks - lives in your individual contract. What Hive does publish is unusually detailed billing machinery: General Terms and Conditions that fix how often you are invoiced, how fast you are debited, how price changes take effect and what happens to small claims, plus a help centre that names, one by one, the extra tasks Hive charges for, the triggers that create them, and the deadlines of its Claims Policy. So a Hive invoice is checked in two places: your contract, line by line, and the published machinery, rule by rule. Below is what Hive publishes, and the checks that follow from it. Where the documents point at the contract, the contract is the document that decides.

What Hive publishes: the billing machinery, not the prices

From Hive's General Terms and Conditions and its published help centre and Claims Policy, as published when we checked in November 2026:

• You are invoiced twice a month and debited seven days later. Clause 10.1 of the GTCs: invoices are issued exclusively in electronic form twice per month, or every fifteen days, and all payments are made by SEPA business-to-business direct debit seven days after the invoice date. Freight and packaging charges may be invoiced separately. There is no long payment window in which to audit at leisure.
• Small claims roll forward instead of being refunded. The same clause: any claims amounting to less than 2% of the total invoice value are reimbursed in the next invoice. A small confirmed error is not paid back on the invoice it belongs to; it becomes a credit you have to track into the following one.
• Price changes you do not answer become price changes you accepted. Clause 10.2: a pricing change takes effect one month after email notification, except items governed by the pricing matrix. Your only published objection is to terminate the contract within two weeks of the notification, in which case Hive holds the old prices for the three-month cancellation period. Silence for two weeks means the new pricing is deemed agreed. Hive reserves the right to adjust prices every six months.
• One hourly rate prices everything outside the standard process. Hive's help centre defines "extra tasks" as activities outside its standard operational procedures, invoiced at the hourly rate for manual labor stated in your contract, and sorts them into four invoice categories: Orders, Restocking, Inventory and Returns extra tasks. The help centre names the triggers for each - unannounced shipments and unannounced SKUs, mixed-SKU boxes and pallets, container unloading, repalletizing one-way or UK pallets, orders unpacked and restocked after a late cancellation, SKUs removed from a packed order, inventory counts you requested, de-kitting, batch movements, unidentifiable returns, and more. The one extra task with a published price is disposal (below).
• Your inbound shipments have a published standard, and deviations are the charge. Restocking shipments are to be announced in the Hive App (the GTCs set acceptance for shipments announced at least 24 hours in advance), packed in single-SKU boxes with the SKU and quantity marked on each box and the restocking label on the outside, on pallets of at most 600 kg and 180 x 120 x 80 cm including the pallet foot, exchanged under the Cologne Pallet Exchange. The GTCs add that no piece-by-piece count is conducted on arrival unless you specifically request one - for which you are charged the standard hourly rate - and that non-standard arrivals are handled as additional work at hourly rates. Hive's help centre adds that unannounced shipments do not start the standard 48-hour restocking process.
• Storage can be billed at a bigger location than your goods need. Clause 6.3: if the smallest suitable storage location size is unavailable when your goods are stored, Hive may store them at the smallest available location and charge you accordingly. Hive's help centre lists its own published drivers of high storage cost: many SKUs or variants, large restocking quantities, batch management activation, bulky SKUs, and reshuffling - and notes that further stock consolidation beyond the basic level is a manual task charged at the contract hourly fee.
• Packaging you buy through Hive becomes stored inventory of yours. Clause 9: Hive does not produce packaging; it resells it. You may buy packaging through Hive, use Hive Standard Material, or supply your own. For material Hive purchases on your behalf, ownership passes to you when it arrives at the fulfillment center - and storage costs apply for that packaging material from the moment it is restocked there. Hive also reserves the right to substitute alternative packaging material if the most appropriate material is not available at the center processing your goods.
• Hive sells you a bundle, and the bundle bills in pieces. Fulfillment is only the centre of the offer: around it sit freight forwarding (Hive arranges transport as agent; it does not carry goods itself), delivery through carriers on Hive contracts or yours, packaging design and procurement, returns handling, and the Hive App subscription every customer takes, with paid add-ons such as Pan-EU, Delivery Promise and the Customer Portal features. Each piece has its own invoicing behaviour, set out below.
• The network runs on one system, in seven countries. A Hive Fulfillment Center is a facility operated directly by Hive or by a Fulfillment Partner, and all of them run Hive's own WMS. Hive's published country list is Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Italy and Poland, reaching - by Hive's figure - 95% of Europe in one to two days.

The figures Hive does publish are the deadlines, thresholds and the few fixed amounts around the prices:

Published rule	Hive's figure
Invoice frequency	Twice per month (every 15 days), electronic only
Payment	Direct debit 7 days after invoice date (SEPA B2B mandate)
Claims below this share of invoice value	Under 2% - reimbursed in the next invoice, not the current one
Price change notice	Takes effect 1 month after email notification
Window to object to a price change	2 weeks, and only by terminating; silence = deemed agreed
Price adjustment frequency Hive reserves	Every 6 months
Shrinkage allowance	1% of the total value of your goods, per year
SKU disposal, non-dangerous goods	EUR 85 per pallet, including manual labor
SKU disposal, dangerous goods	EUR 100-300 per pallet (published as estimates, including the disposal company's and Hive's fees)
Advance commission on customs invoices	2.5% of the total customs duties and tax value, charged by the freight forwarder
B2C shipment maximums (unless otherwise agreed)	30 kg; longest side 120 cm; girth 300 cm
Pallet maximums inbound	600 kg; 180 x 120 x 80 cm including pallet foot
Window to flag errors in a customs declaration	3 business days from receipt
Claims deadline - lost parcels (Tracking Not Updated, Delivered Not Received)	20 business days from the shipment date
Claims deadline - damaged, missing or wrong items	4 calendar days from the delivery date
Hive Order Compensation	EUR 10 flat, credited on the next invoice
Cash on delivery maximum	EUR 1,000 per consignment, where offered
Contract termination notice	3 months, to the end of a calendar month
Hive's special termination trigger	More than 2 due invoices unpaid, or more than EUR 5,000 due

Checks that follow from Hive's own fee rules

1. The audit clock is seven days, and small recoveries live on the next invoice. With invoices landing twice a month and direct debit seven days after the invoice date, an error found on day eight is an error already paid. The audit therefore has to run on every invoice as it lands - and it has to keep a ledger of the claims under the 2% threshold, because Clause 10.1 sends those to the next invoice rather than settling them on their own. Check each new invoice for the carried-forward credits from the previous one before checking anything else: a sub-2% claim that never reappears has not been reimbursed at all, and it will not announce itself.

2. Every price change needs its email, its month, and your two weeks. Hive may adjust prices every six months; each adjustment takes effect one month after email notification, and the only published way to refuse it is to terminate within two weeks, which freezes the old prices for the three-month cancellation period. So keep the notification emails as billing documents: every rate on an invoice that differs from your contract should map to a notification at least a month old, and any rate that changed without one - or inside the month - is outside Clause 10.2. Watch the exception as well: items governed by the pricing matrix are carved out of this rule, so a matrix item can only be checked against the matrix itself, which makes getting the current matrix in writing part of the audit.

3. Every extra-task line needs its published trigger, its category and its hours. Extra tasks are billed at your contract's hourly rate based on time spent, and Hive publishes what counts: the four categories (Orders, Restocking, Inventory, Returns) and the named triggers inside each. A line that cannot be matched to a trigger - no unannounced shipment, no mixed box, no count you requested, no packed order you cancelled - does not meet Hive's own definition of the charge. The restocking category is the strictest test, because the standard it measures deviation from is also published: announced in the app, single-SKU boxes, SKU and quantity on the box, restocking label outside, pallet within the published maximums. If your shipment met the standard, the sorting labour that standard exists to prevent should not be on the invoice. And one trigger has its own trap: Hive does not count inbound goods piece by piece unless you ask, so a unit-by-unit count on the invoice should correspond to a request you made - and to a shipment whose announced quantities made the count necessary.

4. Disposal is the one place Hive publishes a price - hold it to the price. Non-dangerous SKU disposal is EUR 85 per pallet including manual labor; below a pallet it falls back to the hourly rate. Dangerous-goods disposal is published only as estimates of EUR 100-300 per pallet including the disposal company and Hive's fees - which means a dangerous-goods disposal line at the top of the range, or above it, should come with the disposal company's cost broken out, and a non-dangerous pallet billed by the hour instead of at the flat EUR 85 has used the wrong published basis. The same check runs on the neighbouring line: France routes food-category disposal through a food-specific disposal company at the dangerous-goods prices, per Hive's disposal page, so a French food disposal at those prices is published behaviour - and the same charge in another country is a question to ask.

5. Storage billed for a larger location than the goods need is a documented possibility, not an error - unless it persists. Clause 6.3 lets Hive store your goods at the smallest available location when the smallest suitable one is full, and charge accordingly. One month of that is the clause working as written. The check is duration and cause: a SKU that sits in an oversized location month after month, while Hive's own help centre lists reshuffling and consolidation as the remedies (consolidation beyond the basic level is itself an hourly extra task), is a standing uplift you are paying for a temporary condition. Cross-check the other published storage drivers while you are there: batch management activation is a billed feature, so storage on SKUs with batch management switched off should not carry its cost; and a rising SKU-variant count inflates storage by Hive's own account, which makes dead variants a billing issue, not just a range issue.

6. Your packaging is inventory, and it is billed like inventory. If Hive procures packaging for you, you own it from the moment it arrives at the fulfillment center and storage costs apply from the moment it is restocked - before a single parcel has used it. So the packaging stock on the storage lines should move with your order volume: packaging quantities that grow while orders fall are stock you bought, stored at your expense, and may never use. The substitution right cuts the other way as well: Hive may select alternative packaging when the most appropriate material is unavailable at the processing center, so a packaging charge at your custom material's price on orders fulfilled from a center that had substituted standard material has billed you for what was not used.

7. A freight shipment is two invoices, and the second one has a percentage on it. When a freight shipment booked with Hive is delivered, Hive issues a freight invoice (transportation and administrative costs, from the forwarder's offer) and a separate customs invoice (import duties plus import VAT). Three checks follow. The advance commission - the forwarder's charge for paying duties and taxes upfront from its own deferment account - is published as market standard at 2.5% of the total customs duties and tax value: recompute it on every customs invoice, because it is a percentage of a number that itself varies. The customs invoice total should be the authorities' duties and VAT, no more: import VAT is reclaimable by companies, which is precisely why Hive splits it out, so freight or fulfilment charges hiding in the customs invoice pollute a tax document. And the clock: under Clause 8.2 you must flag errors in the customs declaration in writing within three business days of receiving it, and you must settle the customs invoice in full within its terms even while a revision is being requested - so the declaration has to be checked on arrival, not at month-end, and a correction pursued after payment, at your expense for the correction work.

8. Which invoice an order lands on is determined by geography - reconcile both sides of the UK line. Hive's help centre: orders fulfilled from one or more centers in Europe are consolidated into one invoice in euros; orders fulfilled from centers in Europe and the UK produce two separate invoices, for the two currencies. An order routed to the wrong side of that split is a real failure mode in a Pan-EU setup - the same shipment appearing on both invoices, or a UK-fulfilled order billed in euros inside the European consolidation. The routing itself is also checkable: Pan-EU exists to fulfil each order from inside its destination market, so an EU order fulfilled cross-border from the UK - attracting the customs handling the in-EU network exists to avoid - should be visible as the exception it is.

9. The delivery price is a weight bucket in your contract, and the bucket is recomputable. Hive's help centre: most carriers price by actual weight into weight buckets, and the bucket prices sit in your contract under "Delivery price"; where a carrier uses volumetric weight, the conversion factor for that carrier is in the contract's "Delivery prices" notes. So every delivery line can be recomputed from three things you hold: the parcel's actual weight, its dimensions, and the contract page. A parcel billed a bucket above its weight, or volumetric weight calculated with another carrier's factor, is arithmetic, not opinion. Delivery also has a substitution rule worth sampling: if your chosen carrier cannot perform, Hive will use commercially reasonable efforts to pick an appropriate alternative - so orders billed at your chosen carrier's rate but carried by the substitute should price as what actually carried them.

10. Compensation arrives as a next-invoice credit, inside short and uneven deadlines. Hive's Claims Policy splits responsibility - warehouse mistakes are Hive's, transit failures go to the carrier under that carrier's liability policy, and only shipments on a Hive carrier contract can be claimed through Hive at all. The deadlines are the audit's calendar: 20 business days from shipment for lost-parcel claim types, but only 4 calendar days from delivery for damaged, missing or wrong items - with minimum waiting periods before a lost-parcel claim can even be filed (7 calendar days of no tracking update for a standard shipment, 14 for DHL International, 10 days when there was never a first scan). The amounts are equally specific: production cost plus EUR 10 where the fault was Hive's and the goods are gone, a flat EUR 10 where the item is still in the building or coming back - and production cost is whatever you have recorded on the SKU in the Hive App, falling back to the flat EUR 10 alone if those costs are missing or stale, and to nothing at all on missing/wrong-item claims for SKUs without a valid, scannable barcode correctly linked in the app. Finally, approved compensation is applied as a credit on your next invoice: check that it appears. A quarter's worth of approved EUR 10 credits that never landed is exactly the kind of small, lawful, invisible loss the 2% roll-forward rule makes easy to miss.

Two other clocks in the GTCs

Termination and default run on published numbers too. Either side may terminate on three months' notice to the end of a calendar month; Hive may withhold service if due invoices go unpaid, and holds a special termination right once more than two due invoices are unpaid or more than EUR 5,000 is due. At the end of the contract you have thirty days to collect your goods - including returns - at your own expense and conditional on all outstanding invoices being paid, and uncollected goods may be sold or disposed of at your full cost. An exit planned without those thirty days and that disposal charge in it is not planned on Hive's published terms.

Raising a wrong charge with Hive

There is no leisurely dispute window to work in: the invoice is debited seven days after it is issued, so a billing error is normally raised after the money has already left, and the recovery route is the credit, not the refund. Two different systems carry it. Invoice errors and claims under Clause 10.1 of the GTCs are settled on the following invoice if they amount to less than 2% of the invoice value — which makes the follow-through part of the claim: keep a register of every agreed amount and check the next invoice for it before anything else. Shipment failures go through the Claims Policy, on its own uneven calendar: lost parcels (Tracking Not Updated, Delivered Not Received) within 20 business days of the shipment date, and damaged, missing or wrong items within just 4 calendar days of delivery, with minimum waiting periods before a lost-parcel claim can be filed at all. Warehouse mistakes are Hive's; transit failures belong to the carrier, and only shipments on a Hive carrier contract can be claimed through Hive. Approved compensation — production cost plus EUR 10 where the fault was Hive's, a flat EUR 10 Hive Order Compensation where the item survives — is applied as a credit on the next invoice, so the last step of every claim is verifying that the credit landed. Customs declarations run on the fastest clock of all: errors must be flagged in writing within 3 business days of receipt under Clause 8.2, and the customs invoice is settled in full within its terms even while a revision is requested.

Have us check it

Upload your last three Hive invoices - both of the twice-monthly pair, plus any separate freight, customs and packaging invoices in the same period - and the contract they were billed under, including the delivery-price pages and the pricing matrix if you have one. We check every line against the contract and the published machinery, rebuild the extra-task, disposal and advance-commission arithmetic, track the sub-2% claims and compensation credits across invoices, and flag the claims whose 4-day and 20-day windows are still open. Your latest invoice is audited free.

Feeproof is not affiliated with Hive.

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

Dear Hive 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]