Billing Management: #8 Usage Billing in Logistics & Delivery Services

The logistics and delivery industry thrives on movement and precision. Every delivery completed, every kilometre driven, and every ton transported is a measurable activity. However, billing often lags behind. Many logistics companies still rely on fixed-rate or manual billing systems that don't account for fluctuating volumes, seasonal demands, or service variations.

As a result, businesses face challenges such as delayed invoicing, inconsistent revenue, and billing disputes with clients. In any industry where margins are thin and relationships depend on trust, these issues can significantly affect growth.

Zoho Billing brings automation and flexibility to the heart of logistics billing. Through usage-based billing, logistics providers can align their revenue directly with measurable usage, such as the number of deliveries, kilometres driven, or storage duration. This creates a fair, transparent, and scalable billing model for both service providers and clients.

The Traditional Billing Models 

Traditional billing methods in logistics rely heavily on static pricing structures. A flat monthly fee or a standard per-delivery charge may seem convenient, but they often fail to reflect operational reality. Shipment volumes can vary by 30-50% month over month, and manual reconciliation between dispatch data and invoice introduces errors and inefficiencies.

Common challenges include:

• An invoice that doesn't reflect actual usage.

• Lengthy reconciliation cycles.

• Under-billing or over-billing due to manual error.

• Disputes caused by a lack of billing transparency.

• Difficulty scaling as the business grows.

 A static pricing model limits profitability and flexibility. Logistics businesses need billing systems that adapt dynamically to changing workloads, not the other way around.

What does usage billing mean for Logistics? 

Usage-based billing allows logistics companies to charge customers based on actual consumption rather than a fixed value. This aligns perfectly with logistics operations, where activities are measurable and variable.

Sample Metrics	Billing Basis	Sector
Number of Deliveries	per delivery completed	Courier and parcel services
Distance travelled	per km/mile	Long-haul transportation
Shipment weight	per kg/ton	Freight and bulk logistics
Value Added Services	per service event	Packaging services

 
With Zoho Billing, these metrics can be captured automatically from connected systems such as delivery tracking software, GPS devices or warehouse management tools. Each activity becomes a billable event, and invoices are generated automatically with complete transparency.

Let's look at two scenarios explaining how Zoho Billing helps logistics and delivery services based on consumption.

Scenario 1: 

A regional courier service manages shipments for multiple e-commerce clients. Shipment volumes vary drastically, ranging from 500 packages per month for small vendors to 3000 for enterprises. The company needs a flexible model that scales with customer growth while better rewarding higher-volume customers.

Pricing Tier

• For 1-1000 deliveries: $2.80

• For 1001-2000 deliveries: $2.50

• For 2001 and above: $2.20

​If Client A completes 2300 deliveries a month. The billing will be as follows:

Item	Value
No of deliveries	2300
Rate per delivery: Tier1: 1000x$2.80 Tier2: 1000x$2.50 Tier3: 300x$2.20	$2,800 $2,500 $660
Total Invoice Value	$5,960

 

​The service provider integrates the delivery tracking system with Zoho Billing using APIs. Zoho Billing automatically collects delivery data, calculates charges and generates an itemized invoice.

​
As a result, we get accurate, automated billing directly tied to usage. The invoice stays transparent and reduces administrative effort. Adopting a pure usage-based billing model along with a tier-based pricing model helps delivery businesses bill precisely for what is delivered, nothing more or nothing less.

Scenario 2:  

A nationwide carrier, services distributors and manufacturers. Clients have steady monthly shipment volumes but occasionally exceed their limit during high-demand periods. The service provider needs a pricing structure ensuring predictable revenue while capturing additional usage.

​
They offer a plan for $1,500 per month for up to 1000 shipments and an add-on usage cost of $1.20 per extra shipment beyond 1000.

​
If a company ships 1450 packages in a billing cycle. The billing will cover,

Item	Value
Base Plan Price (covers 1000 shipments)	$1,500
Additional Usage	450
Rate for additional shipment	$1.20/extra shipment
Total Invoice Value	$2,040

 
By integrating the dispatch management system with Zoho Billing using API, the additional shipments are tracked, the overage rate is applied, and a consolidated invoice is generated.

​This results in predictable revenue through the base plan and scalable income during peak sessions. Clear, detailed billing that strengthens customer trust.

​
The hybrid model offers flexibility for the service provider and the client, ensuring stability in slow periods and scalability in busy ones.

​
Move on with Zoho Billing 

​Every delivery, kilometre, and warehouse movement represents the value your logistics business creates. With Zoho Billing, that value is captured and converted into accurate, transparent revenue.

​
By leveraging usage-based billing, logistics providers can modernize their financial operations, improve cash flow, and offer customers fair, data-backed pricing. Zoho Billing brings automation and intelligence to the heart of logistics billing, helping businesses deliver precision on roads and through invoices.

As we move from usage billing to logistics, our next service will be Usage Billing in IoTs. Stay tuned!

• Topic Participants

• Hari | Zoho Billing

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• Issue with Zoho Help Portal – Tickets Missing or Not Answered

  Hi, How are you? I think there may be an issue with the Zoho Help Portal. I opened a few tickets directly in the help portal a some time ago but never received any response I also opened ticket 148356451 by email. I did receive a reply to it, but the

• DUNS & Bradstreet and Credit risk monitoring integration with Zoho books

  Small businesses not being paid by bigger clients and clients of all sizes is a huge problem. It will be nice if Zoho develops integration with DUNS & Bradstreet(D&B) and Credit risk monitoring integration with Zoho books. That have small businesses can

• Zoho Forms - Form Rules based on attachment fields

  Many businesses use forms to collect documents and images from customers. In many cases, you may want to trigger a notification or other automation based on whether or not an attachment was added. I've noticed that attachment fields do not appear in Rules

• Add multiple users to a task

  When I´m assigning a task it is almost always related to more than one person. Practical situation: When a client request some improvement the related department opens the task with the situation and people related to it as the client itself, the salesman

• Can't open draft email for editing

  Last night I started composing an email and I let it save in drafts. This morning I want to continue working on the email. It is in my Drafts folder but it will not open. The only option there is to delete it. This is not the first time it has happened. On previous occasions I have just deleted the draft and started afresh, but I really want this one back. Windows 10 with Pale Moon 28.10.0 browser.

• Open filtered deals from campaign

  Do you think a feature like this would be feasible? Say you are seeing campaign "XYZ" in CRM. The campaign has a related list of deals. If you want to see the related deals in a deal view, you should navigate to the Deals module, open the campaign filter,

• Change scheduling emails time

  When sending an individual email there is a great feature to schedule them to send later. I could only use the one time that is suggested. Is there a way to select another time? Regards, Glenn

• Zoho CRM: how can I control which contacts to sync with Outlook?

  I was just playing around syncing contacts from Zoho to MS Outlook (MS365 account.) The problem is our firm has hundreds of thousands of contacts and I don't want to bury my contacts list in outlook. Any help with this is greatly appreciated.

• How to overcome limitations in meetings

  As a company, one of our deliverables is a meeting between two other companies, where we act as facilitators. So, if we recorded this meeting  in Zoho CRM, it should be connected to 2 accounts, 2 contacts, and 1 campaign (a campaign, in our use, is the

• Different MRP / Pricing for same product but different batches

  We often face the following situations where MRP of a particular product changes on every purchase and hence we have to charge the customer accordingly. This can't be solved by Batch tracking as of now so far as I understand Zoho. How do you manage it as of now? 

• Add a 'Log a Call' link to three dot icon in Canvas

  Hi, There's a three dot element when creating a canvas called 'More'. I would like to modify this to add a link that says 'Log a Call' in order to quickly record the details of a cellphone call. I'd also like this to be a simple 'contact' selection and

• Syncing Zoho Forms with Bigin - Embedding issue?

  Hello everyone, I created a Zoho Form for a page on my GoDaddy website to collect leads, which then transfers the data to Bigin. However, I'm facing an issue where it doesn't seem to work properly. I've integrated Zoho Forms with Bigin and tried embedding

• Can not add fields to a Section

  I feel like I'm missing something obvious: I can add new Sections to my form but I can not add fields to the Sections. I've tried fields already on the form as well as dragging and dropping new fields into the Section but nothing will go into it. What

• Record Logged in User while using CRM lookup field

  Is it possible, while using the Zoho CRM lookup field, to automatically use the user account logged into Zoho CRM in a hidden field? I was hoping to add employee accounts to my current plan. But would like a record on the Form submission of who submitted

• Form Rules for Suburb Categories to alternate landing pages or Making a Fields Contents ALL CAPS

  I need to send differentform submissions to two to three different thank-you URLs (for Meta/Google pixels) depending on which suburb a user selects in a form. I have ~400 suburbs split into two categories (A and B, based on business value). Current challenges:

• Collaps Notes

  There are times when long/large notes are added to a record i.e. Accounts or Deals etc. Currently, the full note is displayed in the notes related list section. It would be great if by default only 5 to 10 rows of the note are displayed when the note

• Zoho Down

  I have a drop in my Zoho One services.

• Runing RPA Agents on Headless Windows 11 Machines

  Has anyone tried this? Anything to be aware of regarding screen resolution?

• Problem for EU users connecting Zoho CRM through Google Ads for Enhanced conversions

  Has anyone else experienced this problem when trying to connect Zoho CRM through Google Ads interface to setup enhanced conversions? Did you guys get it fixed somehow? The Problem: The current Google Ads integration is hardcoded to use Zoho's US authentication

• Why am I getting event Pop-up Notification for events that have been cancelled?

  Why is Calendar Notification still popping up for events that have been cancelled or changed? Each time events are cancelled or changed, I have observed that I am still getting notifications for them. Below is a sample pop-up notification for one of the

• Whatsapp Limitation Questions

  Good day, I would like to find out about the functionality or possibility of all the below points within the Zoho/WhatsApp integration. Will WhatsApp buttons ever be possible in the future? Will WhatsApp Re-directs to different users be possible based

• Create a draft in reply to an email via Emails API

  Hi, I’d like to use the outgoing webhook to automatically create a draft reply to incoming mail. How can I use the Emails API to create a draft reply that is linked to an existing email thread? I couldn’t find the relevant method in the documentation.

• India Tech Support

  Is there no phone tech support number for India? And no chat facility either?

• Billing Management: #1 Billing a Universal Business Routine

  Hello, As the saying goes, "Do the hardest job first." We started with the complex subject of finance and revenue management, which is considered the backbone of any business. Now, let's shift our focus and take a deep dive into this Billing Management,

• Show/ hide specific field based on user

  Can someone please help me with a client script to achieve the following? I've already tried a couple of different scripts I've found on here (updating to match my details etc...) but none of them seem to work. No errors flagged in the codes, it just

• What is a a valid JavaScript Domain URI when creating a client-based application using the Zoho API console?

  No idea what this is. Can't see what it is explained anywhere.

• 5名限定 課題解決型ワークショップイベント Zoho ワークアウト開催のお知らせ (9/25)

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。Zoho ユーザーコミュニティチームの藤澤です。 9月開催のZoho ワークアウトについてお知らせします。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 諸事情につき、今月の開催回は中止となりました。 次回は10/31（金）14時からの開催を予定しています。 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目的とした「Zoho ワークアウト」を開催します。 Zoho

• Zoho Calendar not syncing correctly with personal Google Calendar

  Coming to this forum as Zoho Calendar support team is not responding, any more. For the past 8 weeks, I have been having an issue with Zoho Calendar not syncing with my personal Google Calendar correctly. I subscribed to Zoho Calendar iCal in my personal

• Customer Parent Account or Sub-Customer Account

  Some of clients as they have 50 to 300 branches, they required separate account statement with outlet name and number; which means we have to open new account for each branch individually. However, the main issue is that, when they make a payment, they

• need a packing list feature

  In our business, goods listed on an invoice are packed in separate boxes and shipped off. for e.g. an invoice may have 10 items. each item could then be packed in different boxes depending on qty of each item. this packing list is as important as the invoice for purposes of shipping documents.  Request you to add this feature asap.

• Workdrive 5.0 / API Documentation Workflows

  Hi Zoho, When will the API documentation of the workflows be published? We are interested in using it to trigger manual workflows from an external application. Greetings, Justin

• How to keep track of bags, cans, drums of inventory?

  We buy and sell products that are packaged in bags 🛍️, cans🥫, drums🛢️, etc. with batch numbers. When we get a shipment of one of the products, how do we track we received (say) 10 cans each of 5L of a product and maybe we received 10 cans of another

• Zoho Error: This Operation has been restricted. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details

  Hello There, l tried to verify my domain (florindagoreti.com.br) and its shows this error: This Operation has been restricted. Please contact support-as@zohocorp.com for further details. Screenshot Given Below -  please check what went wrong. Thanks

• How many ZOHO-Sites does the ZOHO-One Suite allow for?

  The free version of ZOHO-Sites allows for two sites, but it seems that the professional version (which is included in the ZOHO-One Suite) only allows for two websites. Is that correct? How many sites can I have within one ZOHO-One account?

• Webhook from Zobot to Zoho Flow fails

  I'm trying to connect from zobot to zoho flow. When testing in zflow, I am receiving all entered data from the connector correctly. The SalesIQ connector's "outputreaction" is {} (is this normal or is there a problem?). But as soon as I try my chat bot

• Transition from Sole Proprietorship to GmbH (Limited Liability Company) – Best Approach in Zoho Books / Zoho One

  Hello everyone, I am currently operating under a Zoho One plan with a sole proprietorship in Switzerland. As of January 1st, 2026, I will be incorporating a new legal entity – a GmbH (Swiss equivalent of a Limited Liability Company). While the business

• Best way to display complex Bookings Consultation Descriptions on Zoho Site?

  I am a new user so apologies if this has been asked before. I couldn't find any answers in the forum. We offer 18 complex Consultations to our subscribers. Our current platform lets me put detail on these Consultations thoroughly (200-300 words) during

• DKIM cannot be enabled for the domain as no verified default selector present

  Hi Support Team, For Domain DKIM record trying to enable status. but showing error "DKIM cannot be enabled for the domain as no verified default selector present" So, please resolve the issue. Thank you.

• Issue Connecting My Domain to Zoho Sites Despite Purchasing It from Zoho

  Hello, I am facing an issue connecting my domain to my website on Zoho Sites. Details of the issue: I purchased the domain directly from Zoho. I am already using the same domain successfully with Zoho Mail. However, when I try to assign this domain to

• Insert auto number from main form into subform rows

  Hello. I'm trying to take from my main form "order number" which i have setup as an auto generated number into every line created in my subform. So when a row is created in my subform i want the "order number " from the main form to be inserted automatically.

• Next Page