Thursday February 13, 2025 | VICTORIA, BC
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Canada Post is making some changes to their parcel shipping invoice system. And it doesn’t sound easy.
It data-lingo, they are migrating from their current SAP platform to the next generation cloud-based SAP solution.
“This upgrade will immediately improve how customers ship, mail and access parcel pricing. It will also provide improved billing and invoicing,” says Canada Post in a bulletin to business customers today.
These changes were first announced as about to happen in 2024, but that got delayed.
Rate codes for Parcel Services will expand from 45 to 128, while maintaining the current number of weight steps. The new pricing grid offers more competitive rates across a wider range of shipping lanes.
“All business customers must prepare for invoice changes,” says Canada Post.
- Review new consolidated invoice format
- All charges and adjustments issued by Canada Post will appear on a single consolidated invoice per invoicing period, with filtering available on the new data file.
- There will no longer be separate summary and detailed invoices. The first page of the new consolidated invoice will include a summary of charges by product or service, followed by the detailed section(s).
- Preview the sample updated invoice and inform your Accounting team or third-party vendors (such as freight auditors) that manage your invoices to determine if this may affect current processes.
- Statement of Account will no longer be available after the systems upgrade. The new consolidated invoice will provide a summary of charges by product and/or service.
- Understand updates to the data file invoice
- Data file invoices will continue to be available through Connect or SFTP.
- The data file invoice is changing. As of 2025, the new file format will be CSV (currently it is TXT format). There may be changes to the structure of the file and/or field values that may impact you. For example, some data field headers have changed and there may be additional reference fields.
- If you currently receive a data file for your invoices via Connect or SFTP, please review the specifications for the data file and inform your Accounting team, or third-party vendors (such as freight auditors) that manage your invoices, to update your current templates or databases with the new field headers and other adjustments to ensure the right data is transmitted.
They are also introducing event-based billing and optional paperless manifests.
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