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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Shipping & Courier

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At a glance

Live count of P58 compensation claims currently open against Royal Mail. Each claim is a damaged / lost / delayed consignment with declared value waiting on RMG to refund the merchant. Real-time view, no smoothing.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Royal Mail 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

Same UK DTC homewares brand. Reading taken 09:00 BST on 12 Mar 26. The card reads 52 open claims. The alert at >0 unresolved >7d is tripped (38 claims older than 7 days). Five things to notice:
  1. The 9 escalated claims are abandoned cash. They are past Royal Mail’s stated 30-day adjudication window. Each one needs a chase email to the RMG account team this week; without action they will sit indefinitely. Standard recovery rate after escalation is 70 to 85 percent of declared value.
  2. The 7 “awaiting evidence” claims are the merchant’s bottleneck, not RMG’s. Royal Mail is waiting on photos / receipts / proof-of-value documents from the merchant. These resolve within 5 working days once evidence is uploaded; the claim ages on the merchant’s side until then.
  3. £3,828 is recoverable revenue. Most CFOs treat claims as a write-off; treated as a recovery line with a chase cadence, this brand will recover £2,500 to £3,200 of it over the next 60 days. That is real money for a 4,000-parcel-week brand.
  4. The “rate suddenly degraded” debug case. During the CWU industrial action of August 2022 to April 2023 this brand’s open-claims count spiked from a normal 30 to 50 range to over 200 open claims, mostly delay claims as Tracked 24 / 48 missed aim repeatedly. RMG’s adjudication queue stretched to 60 to 90 days during the period. Recovery rates held but cash was tied up much longer; CFO needs to know.
  5. Compare to Evri claims. Evri’s claim process runs through the Evri Business Account portal with a similar but not-identical SLA (28 days vs RMG’s 30). Evri damage / lost claims typically settle 5 to 10 percent slower; build cash-flow expectations accordingly.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

Open claims is a finance-and-ops metric. Pair it with these to manage the recovery pipeline:

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Royal Mail’s own portal: Royal Mail Click & Drop → Claims lists open claims with status filters. Business Account holders use Royal Mail Business Account → Claims & Compensation → Open Claims which has the official P58 records and supports CSV export. The closest like-for-like view is Status: Open + Under Review + Awaiting Evidence + Escalated, All Service Codes. Why our number may legitimately differ from Royal Mail’s report: Cross-connector reconciliation:

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Royal Mail vs Evri claims, which is faster? Marginal difference. Royal Mail’s stated turnaround is 30 days for damage / loss; Evri’s is 28 days. Both run longer in practice (35 to 45 days typical). Royal Mail’s recovery rate is slightly higher (around 80 percent of declared value vs Evri’s 70 to 75 percent). Special Delivery has the highest recovery (close to 100 percent). For a multi-carrier brand, file claims promptly and chase at day 30; do not wait for the carrier to chase you. What is the strikes-and-industrial-action playbook? The CWU stoppages of Aug 2022 to Apr 2023 caused the open-claims count to spike 4x for many merchants and the adjudication queue stretched to 60 to 90 days. Three actions: (1) keep filing on the normal cadence, do not pause, the count will be high but each claim is still recoverable, (2) inform finance that recovery cash flow is delayed by 2 to 3 months for the duration, (3) for merchants on automated cash-flow forecasting, manually adjust the claims-recovery line for the affected period. Tracked vs untracked, why is untracked invisible here? Untracked Royal Mail does not carry compensation cover for consignments below £20 declared value. The merchant cannot file a P58 claim, so the consignment never enters the claims pipeline. Lost untracked = customer refund, no recovery from RMG. This is a structural reason to avoid untracked for any item above £15 to £20 unit value. My merchant has 200 open claims, that feels high. What is the benchmark? Per-1000-parcel rate is the right denominator, not absolute count. UK DTC benchmark for a Royal Mail-heavy brand is 2 to 5 open claims per 1,000 dispatched parcels. Below 2 is excellent (likely under-claiming), above 5 is a quality issue (packaging, fragile-product mix, or carrier-network event). Compute as (open_claims + closed_claims_in_period) / shipments_total. Why does the count spike at month-end? Two reasons. (1) Customer-service teams batch-file claims weekly or fortnightly; the queue spikes after the batch goes in. (2) The 30-day adjudication window sweeps in a cohort each day; claims that were “in window” become “escalated” and the older cohort lights up amber. Schedule the chase cadence around the 30-day mark, not month-end. The card says >7 days but my CFO wants me to chase >14 days, why? Defaults are conservative. For a brand filing 50+ claims a month the 7-day threshold pages too often; raise to 14 days. For a brand filing 5 claims a month the 7-day threshold is safer. The right cadence is “chase whichever is most likely to be abandoned without intervention”, typically anything past day 14 to 21. My open-claims count climbed sharply, what is the playbook? Ordered by likelihood. (1) Check Exception Rate for an upstream damage / loss spike. (2) Check whether a single fragile SKU launched recently (high-claim items concentrate around new launches with sub-optimal packaging). (3) Check carrier-side incident history (sortation centre fire, weather, industrial action). (4) If none of (1) to (3) explain it, audit the claim-filing process, the CS team may have caught up on a backlog, which is good news (recovery up) but spikes the count. How do I plan for Q4 / Christmas peak? Expect open-claims count to rise 50 to 80 percent from December through mid-January. Reasons: more parcels = more exceptions, gift-shipping has higher fragile / high-value content, customer-claim window for “did not arrive in time for Christmas” delay claims peaks in early January. Three actions: (1) increase finance accrual for claim-recovery cash-flow lag, (2) brief the CS team on faster evidence-gathering (photos within 48h), (3) hold the chase cadence; do not let claims age past 30 days during the peak.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Open Claims is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Royal Mail 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.