How to read a courier COD remittance report

A COD remittance report is the courier's account of what it collected on your behalf and what it is paying you. Most merchants glance at the total and file it. Read properly, it is the only document that tells you whether every delivered order actually turned into cash.

What the report is

Each payout has a statement behind it. The statement lists shipments settled in that cycle, one line per AWB, with the amount collected and the charges netted off. The bottom line should equal the transfer in your bank. Formats vary — PDF, Excel, CSV, or a download inside the carrier portal — but the fields are broadly the same.

The fields that matter

AWB or tracking number

Your join key. Everything depends on this number existing in both your order records and the statement. If your store does not store the AWB against the order, fix that first — without it, reconciliation becomes manual guesswork based on names and amounts.

COD amount collected

What the rider took from the customer. Compare it to your order value, not to the payout. A mismatch here is a partial collection: the customer paid less than the invoice, perhaps after negotiating over a damaged item or refusing part of a multi-item order.

Delivery or collection date

Determines which cycle a shipment belongs to. Use it to explain absences before you call them discrepancies — a delivery after the cut-off is simply in the next statement.

Deductions

Usually several columns rather than one. Expect some combination of freight or shipping charge, a COD handling fee (a percentage of collected value or a flat amount, whichever is higher), return-to-origin charges, failed-attempt fees, fuel and remote-area surcharges, packaging or insurance if you bought it, and VAT on the service charges.

Net payable

Collected minus deductions. Summed across lines, this is your transfer. If the sum of net payable does not equal the deposit, something was applied outside the line detail — an adjustment, a prior-period correction, or a withheld amount. Ask what it was.

Legitimate deduction or short payment?

The test is your rate card. A deduction is legitimate when it is a charge you agreed, at the rate you agreed, applied to a shipment that qualifies for it. Three checks catch most problems:

• Rate check: is the COD fee percentage the one in your contract, and is the minimum charge being applied correctly on low-value orders?
• Eligibility check: is a return fee charged on a shipment your own records show as delivered, or a delivery fee charged twice on one AWB?
• Arithmetic check: recompute net payable for a sample of lines. Rounding rules and VAT treatment are a frequent source of small, repeated differences.

Matching the report to your orders

Export your orders for the same period with order ID, AWB, order value, order status and delivery date. Join to the statement on AWB. Then classify every row into one of four buckets: reconciled, short paid, missing (delivered with no line), or duplicate (the same AWB settled twice). That classification is the whole exercise — the step-by-step version is in the COD reconciliation guide.

Common traps

• Statement totals that include prior-cycle adjustments, so the period does not match your order date range.
• Cancelled or returned orders still carrying charges because the status was updated in your store but never in the carrier system.
• Multiple parcels for one order, each with its own AWB, where only one carries the COD value.
• Currency and VAT columns applied inconsistently between countries on multi-market accounts.

Keep the evidence

Archive every statement with the date you received it. Disputes are decided on documents, and a claims window that runs from the remittance date is much easier to defend when you can show exactly which statement a shipment did or did not appear in.

Want a second pair of eyes on one statement? Send it with your order export and we will return the four-bucket breakdown. The free preview takes one file.