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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Live count of open claims filed against PostNord (lost in transit, damaged, contents missing) where the claim is currently unresolved AND has been open more than 7 days. Money on the table, each open claim represents lost or damaged inventory the merchant has refunded or replaced for the customer but not yet recovered from PostNord. The 7-day age filter excludes the normal claim-processing window and surfaces only the cases that have stalled.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your PostNord data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

The Stockholm outdoor-apparel brand. Reading taken at 09:00 CET on 14 Mar 26. The card displays:
17 open claims (>7 days unresolved)
What this tells the merchant:
  1. 17 open claims at 12-day average age means the queue is moderately stalled. Healthy ops should drain claims to zero within 14 to 21 days from filing; 12 days average with 17 still open suggests roughly 30 percent of the active claim volume has stalled past PostNord’s normal processing window.
  2. The €660 estimated recoverable is real money. At this brand’s 60 percent contribution margin, that €660 recovered is equivalent to €1,100 of unfunded sales they’d otherwise need to make to net the same contribution. Worth the operational effort to chase.
  3. The 18-day-average CONTENTS_MISSING cases are the priority drain target. These have the lowest recovery rate (50 percent) AND the longest age, classic stalled-on-evidence pattern. PostNord typically requests photo evidence of the unboxed parcel and original packing manifest; many merchants don’t have that documentation captured at outbound, so the claim stalls. Action: implement an outbound-photo capture workflow at the warehouse for high-value SKUs.
  4. The 14-day-average LOST_IN_TRANSIT cases are routine. PostNord’s process for lost-parcel claims includes a 14-day “search window” before declaring the parcel lost; some of these will resolve naturally as the parcels are eventually found. Watch for cases past 21 days, those are unlikely to resolve and should be escalated to a human PostNord account manager.
  5. The 1 DELAY_COMPENSATION case is the easiest win. Service Level Guarantee credits on missed Express SLA are administratively simple, the SLA either was or wasn’t met, evidence is on PostNord’s own scan record. 95 percent recovery rate. If multiple Express-SLA misses are accumulating without claims being filed, the merchant is leaving money on the table; automate the filing workflow.
  6. The “queue suddenly grew” debug case. If the open count jumps from 5 to 25 in a single week, the cause is usually upstream: a major weather event 14 to 21 days earlier produced a wave of LOST or DELAYED claims that are now stalled at PostNord’s processing centre because the storm overwhelmed the team’s capacity. Plan additional ops capacity 2 weeks after every major weather event to chase the inevitable claims wave.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in PostNord’s own portal: PostNord Business Portal → Claims, filter on Status = Open and sort by Filed Date ascending. Apply a date filter for “Filed >7 days ago” to match this card’s threshold. The card’s headline count should agree with the portal to within 1 to 2 claims. Smaller divergences trace to the timing of status transitions during the 15-minute polling cycle. Why our number may legitimately differ from PostNord’s portal: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Why is the threshold 7 days? Shouldn’t I track all open claims? PostNord’s published processing SLA is 5 to 10 business days for routine claims. Tracking all open claims (including ones in normal processing) creates alert fatigue, the queue is always non-empty even when nothing is actually wrong. The 7-day filter surfaces only the stalled cases that need merchant action. Use Claim Value (open) for the total queue including in-processing. My open-claim count is 17 but I only filed 5 claims in the last 30 days. Why is the count higher? Claims persist in the open queue until they’re resolved (paid, partially paid, or rejected). The 17 represents the cumulative stalled queue across all unresolved historical claims that crossed the 7-day age threshold. If your queue is growing faster than you can resolve, the count grows faster than the filing rate. Pair with Claim Value to see the cumulative monetary exposure. What’s the playbook when the queue is growing? In order of impact: (1) Identify the oldest claims (>21 days) and escalate to your PostNord account manager directly; phone or email is more effective than portal messaging. (2) Identify the missing-evidence claims (CONTENTS_MISSING typically), and either supply missing photos / packing manifests or accept the loss. (3) Implement upstream evidence capture, outbound photos for high-value SKUs, packing-list snapshots, courier-handover scans. The cost of capture is small versus the cost of unrecoverable claims. (4) Quarterly account review with PostNord, large merchants (>10k parcels/month) typically negotiate a dedicated claims-handler relationship that meaningfully reduces stall rate. A claim has been open 25 days. Will I still recover the value? For DAMAGED with photo evidence: probably yes, escalate now. For LOST_IN_TRANSIT past 21 days: PostNord will usually pay if the parcel hasn’t been found by then; the search window is 14 days plus a 7-day documentation window. For CONTENTS_MISSING: depends on evidence quality; without strong evidence (warehouse photo of packed contents, shipping-weight discrepancy report) the recovery rate drops sharply after 14 days. Aged-out claims are not auto-rejected but become harder to substantiate. How does this differ from the customer-side refund I issued? This card tracks merchant-facing claims with PostNord. The refund or replacement to the customer was a separate transaction; the merchant has already absorbed that cost. The claim is the recovery process against PostNord. Open-claim count of 17 typically corresponds to 17 customer refunds the merchant has already paid; this card surfaces the unrecovered tail. Can I auto-file claims from Vortex IQ? Partial. Vortex IQ can identify claim-eligible events (DAMAGED scans, LOST_IN_TRANSIT timeouts, missed Express SLAs) and surface them for filing; the actual filing requires a human-in-the-loop step because PostNord’s claim form requires merchant-side documentation (purchase value, customer impact narrative, evidence files). Some merchants automate the easy SLA-credit cases; DAMAGED and LOST cases usually need human attention. My recovery rate is 50 percent. Is that good? Below the published norm. Healthy DTC merchants on PostNord recover 70 to 85 percent of claim value across all categories. 50 percent suggests either: (1) high CONTENTS_MISSING share (lower-recovery category by structure); (2) poor documentation discipline (claims filed without strong evidence); or (3) an account-relationship issue where PostNord’s claims team is treating your filings as low-priority. The fix is documentation upstream and account-manager relationship. Multi-account, does the card aggregate across PostNord SE / DK / NO / FI? Yes, FX-converted to display currency. Per-country drill-down shows native counts. Different countries have different claim-processing cultures; Sweden is typically faster than Finland; Denmark sits in the middle. Use per-country drill to compare. Does industrial action affect the claim queue? Yes, indirectly and significantly. Strikes during 2020 (Sweden) and 2022 (Denmark) produced 3 to 5× normal claim volume in the 14 to 30 days following the strike, as the LOST and DAMAGED tail surfaced. PostNord’s claims-processing capacity didn’t scale to match, so the open queue stalled. Plan for a 4 to 6 week stalled-queue window after any major industrial action. Should claim count be on a finance dashboard or operations dashboard? Both. Operations needs the count for workload planning; Finance needs the value (peer card) for cash-flow recognition (most accounting frameworks require recognising the recoverable as an asset only when probability of recovery is high; an aged stalled claim may need to be written off). The two dashboards serve different decisions on the same underlying data. Why include DELAY_COMPENSATION (Express SLA credits) here? Aren’t those automatic? They’re supposed to be automatic but in practice many merchants don’t claim them, leaving SLA credits unredeemed. The card surfaces them so the merchant can reconcile against PostNord’s auto-applied credits and chase any missing. Express SLA credits are the easiest claim category to recover (95 percent rate) but the most often forgotten.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Open Claims is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across PostNord and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.