How to Check for Carrier Adjustments in ShipStation

Most operations do not know what their carrier bill actually was. They add up the label costs in a spreadsheet and take the sum, which is what the labels cost when they were bought rather than what the carrier charged. Carriers adjust the price after their facility has the parcel, and the difference never reaches the spreadsheet.

I have seen adjustments and fees run to nearly $50,000 across a year. That is a full-time salary leaving the business without anyone having decided to spend it.

The record exists. If you use ShipStation’s carrier accounts, the billing data sits two clicks away and shows each adjustment as its own line.

This route only works on ShipStation carrier accounts. On your own accounts the same records live in each carrier’s billing portal instead.

Pulling the records

1. In ShipStation, click the gear icon in the top right of the nav bar.
2. In the left-hand menu click “Shipping”, then the “Carriers” submenu.
3. Under the “ShipStation Carriers” tab, “USPS” is the first row. On the right of that row, under “Actions”, click the three dots and choose “View Reports”.
4. That opens stamps.com. In the left-hand menu, click “Balances”.
5. In the top nav bar, open the “Report Type:” dropdown and select “Transactions”.
6. You are now looking at every transaction on the account. The right-most column gives the type. A cell reading Adjustment ID opens the charge the carrier added after you paid for the label, and the reason they gave for it.
7. Export it. The icon in the top right of the nav bar downloads the transactions as a CSV, and it takes the filters with it, so set a date range first if you only want a period.

Reading them

What you are looking for is the pattern rather than the total. Adjustments cluster: one SKU whose dimensions are wrong, one lane picking up a surcharge nobody priced, one service being re-rated on every shipment. The total tells you it is worth fixing. The clustering tells you what to fix first.