There have been more than a few instances where carriers have gone out of business and left behind transfers on to their accounts that can no longer be processed. Sometimes you are lucky enough to get a warning before all is lost. One of the signs that should not be ignored is if the carrier's pallet accounts are made inactive by the pallet hire companies. This can happen if the carrier does not pay hire hire invoice. If the transfers you have raised to the carrier cannot get processed then you need to immediately stop transferring more pallets to the carrier's account. You could then work on a strict exchange basis with the carrier or you could transfer direct to the end receiver. You could also decide to use a different carrier. If you have transfers outstanding then you could ask for the carrier to dehire the pallets off your account or return them physically to you. Either way, you should not let this problem continue for very long. A good first step is to discuss the situation with the carrier and then decide what to do next. It might be a short term cashflow problem or it could be something more serious.

There has been much talk of how Australia is going to cope to meet the freight demands in the future. You can already see some of the issues appearing now - such as driver shortages, congestion, inadequate road and rail infrastructure. The Federal Government is developing a strategy to address this problem. A number of working groups will be engaged in this task. How will the increasing freight task impact on pallets? Will there be improvements in the management of pallets so that the massive losses we see in today's world will be a rarity in the future? The following link will provide more information on the Federal Government's Freight and Supply Chain Strategy. https://infrastructure.gov.au/transport/freight/national-strategy-faq.aspx

You often get receivers correcting the date they receive your pallets. This could be quite valid as the delivery could have been delayed. The question then is should the despatch date be changed. PalletWatch has built in transit days, e.g. if you are going from Victoria to New South Wales then the receipt date is dated one day after the despatch date. If the receipt date is corrected then either the despatch date was also wrong and should be changed or it could be correct but the delivery was delayed. If you do change the despatch date then it could affect your reconciliation results so you would only want it changed if it was wrong.