ShipMonk invoice audit

A ShipMonk bill is not a monthly bill in the usual sense. Charges accrue daily against an account balance, invoices close twice a month, storage is counted from a snapshot taken at 10 PM every night, and the most confusing lines have ShipMonk's own names: Period Adjustments, Postage Due Returns, the Monthly Minimum Pick Fee. There is no public rate card to check any of it against — current prices sit inside your custom quote. What ShipMonk does publish is the machinery: its pricing page, billing FAQ and help centre define each fee, each billing unit and each cadence. This page works through that machinery, then lists the checks that follow from it.

How ShipMonk billing runs

• Daily accrual, twice-monthly invoices. Most services are billed daily or in real time. Invoices generate twice a month, and each finalized invoice covers its half of the month. The Monthly Minimum is the exception: it is settled at month end and can only appear on the second invoice, the one covering the 15th to the end of the month.

• You spend from a balance, not against a credit account. Orders only move out of "Queued To Submit" while the account balance is positive, and most accounts fund the balance by auto-replenishment. ShipMonk's own FAQ warns what this does to your card statement: if your replenishment cap is $250 per transaction and a $1,000 bill closes, it runs as four $250 transactions. Split transactions are how the system works, not a duplicate charge. The minimum auto-replenishment amount is $250; manual top-ups have no minimum.

• Storage comes from a 10 PM snapshot. Storage is charged per location, per day, from nightly snapshots taken at 10 PM, and your finalized invoice shows the quantity of each type of location you were charged for, day by day. Which type a SKU sits in — bin sizes up to pallets — is a ShipMonk decision that moves with replenishments, fulfilment and SKU movements, and the Carrying Cost column of the Shipped Inventory report shows what each product's storage added up to.

• Shipping is settled in two passes. You are billed for shipping when the label is created, then trued up: a Period Adjustment is the difference between that amount and what the carrier finally bills ShipMonk, and ShipMonk's FAQ puts the causes down to carrier surcharges nobody knew about at label time and to incorrect weights and dimensions in your product data. The adjustment lands on a later invoice, detached from the shipment it belongs to.

• The Monthly Minimum has two published versions. The pricing page defines it from your quote: projected monthly order volume multiplied by your first-item pick fee, reduced by 20%. The help centre's minimums doc describes the floor most accounts actually get: a default of $1,000 a month, which rises to match your storage fees in any month where storage alone passes $1,000. Both versions agree on the mechanics: it is a shortfall charge, owed only when the month's pick and pack, receiving and special project fees do not reach it, and the Monthly Minimum Pick Fee only starts in the month after your account's first receiving.

The published price points

ShipMonk's current pricing page quotes individually and prints no dollar rates. The figures below are the ones from ShipMonk's published pricing summary, carried in its software directory listings; treat them as the reference points to compare your quote against, not as a promise of your rates.

Charge	Published figure	Billed on
First item pick fee	$3.00	per order
Additional item pick fee	$0.75	per extra item
Promotional insert	$0.20	per order
Storage — small / medium / large / X-large bin	$1 / $2 / $3 / $4	per month
Storage — pallet	$25	per month
Returns processing	$2.00, plus $0.50 per additional item	per return
Packaging materials	$0.15 – $2.00	per order, as used
Special projects	$45	per man-hour
Container unloading, floor-loaded	$300 (20 ft) / $500 (40 ft)	per container
Minimum pick and pack fees	$250	per month (older published structure; see the minimums section above for the current default)

Around those points, the published rules fill in the rest. Pick and pack is a base order fee that includes the first item, with the lower additional-item fee after it, and custom packaging is billed as one additional item. Packaging materials are billed per order for what was used, while tape, air pillows and other standard supplies are inside pick and pack. Receiving carries extra fees when an inbound shipment breaks the receiving guidelines, and the onboarding guide adds a $0.20 fee for each product that arrives without a barcode. Returns split three ways: the processing fee, a return postage fee when ShipMonk supplies the label, and Postage Due Returns, where services whose rate never included return postage — the FAQ names FedEx SmartPost and DHL Global Mail — have the USPS return charge passed through. Subscription and crowdfunding work runs in kitting batches of identical orders, and a batch under 50 orders draws a batching fee. Paying has its own published scale: no transaction fee from a linked US bank account, $5 flat by ACH, 3% by card, 4% by PayPal, and a late fee of 5% of an overdue balance with a $30 minimum.

Where the charges live, and how to question one

Everything sits in the Billing Portal, reached from the account balance figure in the top right of the ShipMonk app. An invoice's full line items hide behind "Details" in the Actions column. The Invoiced Items Report is the working tool: every invoiced item back to August 2024, filterable by date range, transaction type, category, subcategory, reference number or tracking number — which is how you pull, say, every Period Adjustment or every storage line for one SKU across several invoices at once. The portal also holds your VCN (Virtual Carrier Network) rate sheets, and invoices can be emailed as PDFs at the end of each billing period if you set an address under Invoice Delivery.

ShipMonk publishes no billing-dispute procedure or deadline. What it publishes is a route: the billing FAQ closes by inviting you to send specific line items to the support team for review, the minimums doc gives [email protected] for minimum questions, and billing questions generally go to a Happiness Engineer on the same address. Service failures are a separate track — the claims portal inside the platform, for filing and tracking claims. A billing question is therefore won or lost on the evidence you attach: the invoice period, the line, and the rule it breaks.

Six checks that come out of ShipMonk's own rules

1. Rebuild storage from the snapshots before you question anything else. Your finalized invoice gives locations by type for each day, so the storage total is arithmetic: days × locations × your rates, per type. Three failures show up in that arithmetic: stock that shipped mid-period still accruing after its last night; one SKU counted in two location types on the same night; a location type surviving after the stock was consolidated down — pallets that became bins should bill as bins. The Carrying Cost column per product tells you which SKU to start with.

2. Read the second invoice of the month for the minimum, and only there. A minimum line on the first invoice of a month is wrong by ShipMonk's own cadence. On the second, do the subtraction yourself: the month's pick and pack, receiving and special project fees against the minimum your contract sets. If the fees clear it, no minimum is owed. If storage passed $1,000 that month, check whether your minimum silently rose to meet it, and whether your contract allows that. In the month after your first receiving — and only from then — the minimum pick fee applies at all.

3. Make every Period Adjustment produce its carrier bill. An adjustment is defined as a difference from a real carrier charge, so each one should trace to a shipment and a carrier invoice amount. Pull them all from the Invoiced Items Report by tracking number and look for the pattern ShipMonk itself names: a wrong weight or dimension on one product record manufactures the same adjustment on every shipment of that SKU. Correct the record and the stream stops; pay them one by one and it never does.

4. Untangle the three return charges parcel by parcel. Processing is owed on every return that physically arrives, customer or undeliverable, at the same fee. Return postage is owed only where ShipMonk provided the label. Postage Due is owed only on services whose outbound rate excluded return postage. A parcel billed with postage it never travelled on — or a processing fee against a tracking number that never came back — is a line to send back.

5. Refuse to see a duplicate where the balance explains it. Because ShipMonk collects from a prepaid balance in capped replenishment transactions, identical amounts on a card statement are usually one bill collected in slices, and the Transactions ledger in the portal shows the real sequence. The duplicate worth disputing is inside the invoices themselves: the same order, tracking number or ASN appearing in two invoice periods. The Invoiced Items Report, filtered by reference or tracking number across both periods, settles it in one search.

6. Test each extra against its published trigger. A batching fee needs a kitting batch under 50 identical orders — count the batch. A barcode fee needs a product that arrived without a barcode — name the SKU. A special project line needs a quote given before the work and hours that multiply out as people × hours — two people for two hours is four hours, billed once. A gift message on your own card is one additional pick fee, not a service charge. And a transaction fee has to match the rail you paid on: zero from a linked bank account, $5 by ACH, 3% by card, 4% by PayPal.

Have us check it

Upload your ShipMonk invoice files (CSV or PDF) and your quote to Feeproof: every billed amount is checked against the quote and given a status, and the dispute letter is included. The first audit is free.

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

Dear ShipMonk 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]