How to read your Amazon DSP route invoice

What the weekly invoice lists

The route invoice is a table. Each line has a service date, a description, usually a station or route code, a quantity, a rate and an amount. Route lines repeat every day for every station, so a week at two stations has fourteen route lines before anything else. The variable lines come after: fuel, incentives, adjustments and credits, each with its own description.

Download the invoice as a spreadsheet if you can. A PDF is fine for reading, but you will want to sort and add up lines.

Matching lines to your rate card

Your rate card is the list of rates your contract says you are paid for each kind of line, and the dates each rate applies. For every line on the invoice, find the rate that should apply: same kind of work, same route type if your rates differ by route, and a date inside the rate's start and end.

Then compare. If the line shows a rate, compare rates. If it shows only a quantity and an amount, divide the amount by the quantity and compare that, without rounding until the end, because per-package and per-stop rates are small and rounding hides real money.

Allow a small tolerance for rounding on Amazon's side. A difference of a cent or two per line isn't worth a dispute. A difference of a few dollars on every route line is.

Lines that are often wrong

Three patterns are worth checking every week.

• Paid below the rate card. In the sample week, every standard route line pays $285.00. If your rate card for that route type says $289.00 from that date, each of the 282 routes that week is $4.00 short, $1,128.00 in total.
• An expected line missing. Some variable lines appear almost every week; fuel is the usual one. If a line you have seen in most recent weeks is missing this week, ask. Estimate its size from the weeks around it, and say it is an estimate.
• A total that fell while hours didn't. If the invoice total dropped by more than a tenth from last week, but your timecards show about the same number of people working about the same days, something may have been left off. This one is a question, not a claim; the invoice can't prove it and neither can you yet.

Adjustments and credits deserve a read too. A credit for missed stops, like the sample's, should match something you know happened. If it doesn't, that is a question for Amazon support.

Building your own rate card

If you don't keep one, start with your current contract or rate notices and write one row per rate: a label, what kind of line it applies to, the words that appear in the invoice description, the unit (route, hour, package, stop or week), the rate, and the date it starts. When a rate changes, end the old row the day before and add a new one. Never edit an old rate in place, or last quarter's checks change under you.

Keep one rule: only one rate can apply to any line. If two rows could both match a line, make one of them more specific.

When to dispute and when to ask

Dispute when you can show the arithmetic: the line, the rate that applied that day, the difference and the total. A rate shortfall across every route line is that kind of claim.

Ask when you can't. A missing fuel line or a total that fell are patterns, and the honest message is a question: was this left off, and if so when will it be corrected? Asking keeps the relationship, and the answer often turns the question into a claim or closes it.

Either way, record what you sent, to whom, the reference you got back, and the outcome. Credits often land as a line on a later invoice.

How SXT Ops handles this

On the Station + Back office plan ($699 per station per month), you keep your rate card in SXT Ops and import route invoices as CSV or Excel files. Three rules run on every import: lines paid below the rate card, an expected recurring line missing (fuel by default), and a weekly total that fell while timecard hours held, which is shown as a question rather than money owed. Each finding lists the invoice lines behind it, and a dispute draft comes with the evidence as a CSV. You send it; SXT Ops never contacts Amazon.

Fleet invoices get the same kind of check, and the fleet invoice audit guide walks through it. See the checks on Payment gaps, try your own numbers in the payment gap calculator, or bring one station to the pilot.