It arrives as a spreadsheet with eighty rows and twenty-five columns, and it is the most useful document your courier partner sends you. It is also the one least likely to be read, because nobody has an hour on a Tuesday to compare eighty rows against their own screen.
What is in it
One row per parcel: their waybill number, your reference, where it went, whether it was delivered, how many attempts it took, and a comment. The comment is where the money is. On a returned parcel it carries the number of the new waybill the return travels under, which is the number that will appear on their invoice next month and that your system has never seen.
The three things worth finding
Returns you do not have a return number for. Without it the return cannot be tracked and its charge cannot be matched. Parcels they say are delivered and you say are not, or the other way round; usually your tracking stopped early, sometimes their report is older than your last scan. Parcels on their report that are not yours, which you will otherwise pay for.
Let the software read it
Upload the report as they sent it. The return numbers are recorded against the right parcels, so tracking of the return starts the same day. Unknown parcels are listed, not created. And every disagreement between their status and yours is shown with the date on both sides, so a row that is simply older than your own tracking is filed apart from a real difference. Nothing on the report changes a status by itself; it tells you where to look.
Five minutes, once a month, and the first upload usually finds something that has been quietly wrong for a while. For the rest of the month-end, see courier software with cash on delivery that reconciles.