Operations

Invoice reconciliation

Matching what each provider billed against what each delivery actually did, then pursuing the difference. The arithmetic is not the hard part: charges, credits for failed attempts, and surcharges arrive in different formats from couriers, contracted fleets, third-party delivery channels, and your own drivers, each with its own dispute window. Cost per delivery you have not reconciled is cost you cannot manage.

Where this fits

The day-to-day vocabulary of running deliveries. Routes, waves, drops, manifests, ETAs, SLAs. These are the units operators reason in, and the inputs every downstream model needs.

Related terms

Zone: The geographic unit an operation plans, prices, and measures against: a set of postal codes or a drawn boundary carrying its own capacity, service level, and cost profile. Reliability and cost move per zone per shift per provider, so a single network-wide average hides the places where the promise is actually breaking.
Telematics: The stream of location, speed, fuel, and diagnostic data a connected vehicle emits. The raw signal underneath fleet visibility, safety scoring, and utilization, and an input Nash reads when it dispatches and re-routes an internal fleet.
Service time: How long a stop takes once the vehicle arrives: park, unload, carry, install, capture proof, return to the vehicle. Distinct from dwell time, which is spent waiting, and from the service window, which is the arrival window promised to the recipient. Service time set too low is the most common reason a plan that looked feasible at 6 a.m. falls apart by noon.
Reverse logistics: Everything that moves backward through the network: returns, exchanges, recalls, failed deliveries, and reusable-asset recovery. The half of logistics most operations bolt on last, and the half where cost and customer trust quietly leak.
Vehicle utilization: The share of a vehicle's available capacity actually used on a route, measured by weight, volume, pallet positions, or stops. Capacity left unused and missed promises often share a cause: it was committed in the wrong place at the wrong time.