Most disputes between a shop and a courier are about money rather than parcels. Three habits prevent nearly all of them.
We settle cash collections for about thirty shops, and in five years we have had four genuine disagreements about money. That is a low number and it is not because we are careful people. It is because of three arrangements that make an error findable, and any shop using any courier should insist on all three.
Settle daily, and never net. Our collections reach a shop's account the next working morning, as the full amount collected, and our delivery charges are invoiced separately at the end of the month. The temptation on both sides is to net the two together and pay the difference, and it saves a transfer and makes the numbers impossible to check. Once an amount has been netted, a shop reconciling a month has to reverse the arithmetic before they can begin, and almost nobody does, which means an error sits there forever.
Insist on a parcel level statement. Not a total. A line per parcel with the date, the receiver, the amount collected and a reference. Our daily settlement message carries exactly that, and it means a shop can match its own order list against ours in a few minutes. A courier who sends you a single figure is asking you to trust them, and trust is not a control.
Agree the cap in advance. We collect up to 5,000 rufiyaa on one parcel. Above that, the customer transfers to the shop directly and we deliver against the shop's confirmation. The reason is simple: a rider carrying fifteen thousand rufiyaa of other people's money through Malé on a bike is a risk nobody is being paid to take, and the day something goes wrong is the day everybody discovers there was no agreement.
Two smaller habits. Reconcile weekly rather than monthly, because a mistake found on Tuesday is a conversation and a mistake found five weeks later is an argument. And keep your own record of what you handed over, in one place. The commonest source of a dispute is not a missing payment, it is a parcel the shop is sure it sent and which was never written down by anybody, because it was handed to a rider in the street instead of going through the collection.
That last one is why we ask accounts to send orders through one channel. A shop using messages, telephone calls and handing parcels to riders directly will eventually lose one, and it will always be the one nobody recorded.
