Auditing Freight Bills

In a world where every dollar counts, more and more folks are scrutinizing every bill and every charge their company receives. Freight charges are no exception, that is why more customers than ever are investing in a heavy duty NTEP 4×4 Floor Scale. When you do find discrepancies with your freight carrier, don’t be surprised if it has to do with the readability of their scale.

Recently, I stumbled onto something that at first looked coincidental. I was auditing freight bills for a customer and I kept coming up with corrected weights by the carrier and the corrected weights all ended in either a “5″ or a “0″. One shipment contained 8 pallets and each pallet had a corrected weight that ended in 5 or 0. That intrigued me. Coincidence? I then researched and found that of 170 corrected freight bills due to weight changes, all 170 ended in 5 or 0.

My hypothesis was that perhaps forklift scales had something to do with this. I knew that carriers had been using forklift scales for some time so I decided to do some research. I contacted a few carriers and the manufacturer and learned the following: Continue reading

Common Questions Answered Regarding Counting Scales

Counting Scales are very similar to other scales in terms of weighing, but the counting scale does two additional functions, by performing operations in division and multiplication based on the internal resolution.  Please continue reading below as Jim Daggon and Ann Crowley from Rice Lake Weighing Systems answer some of the common questions relating to counting scales like the Digi DC-300, Digi DC-190, DC-788 and the DC-782.

1. What is internal resolution?
The internal resolution of a counting scale is the number of divisions into which it divides the total capacity of the scale.

Example: A 50 lb counting scale with 1 million count resolution divides up the 50 lb into 1,000,000 parts. This means each internal resolution is translated to 50/1,000,000 or 0.00005 lb.All of the weights are calculated on this basis. For example, if some parts were placed on the counting scale, and the internal calculation was 210 internal counts, the weight to be displayed would be 210 times 0.00005 lb = 0.01050 lb. Since the weight display might only be five digits, then the weight display would be 0.01 lb. This is the external resolution. (rounded off).

The operator can key in the sample quantity—for example, ten pieces. The scale still “knows” how many internal counts are being used (210) and now divides that number by 10 to get the number of internal counts per piece (210/10 = 21). Continue reading