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Card class: Hero • 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.
What it countsCOUNT(claims WHERE status IN [submitted, under_review, awaiting_evidence, escalated]), every claim that has not yet been settled or rejected by Royal Mail Group.
API endpointGET /claims/v1/list (Royal Mail Claims API). Reads claimId, claimType (damage / loss / delay), status, submittedAt, declaredValue, currency. Supplemented by Click & Drop claims portal export for merchants without API access.
Service-tier scopeTracked services only. Untracked 1st / 2nd class consignments below £20 declared value are not covered by Royal Mail’s standard compensation scheme; claims are not accepted. Tracked 24 / 48 cover up to £150 standard, Special Delivery up to £500 / £1,000 / £2,500 (depending on declared option).
Tracked vs untracked splitAll open claims on this card are tracked. Untracked write-offs flow through merchant refund metrics (shopify.refund_value) because they are not recoverable from RMG.
Return-leg inclusionOutbound only. Tracked Returns claims are filtered out (returns claim flow runs through the receiving merchant, not the original sender).
Geographic scopeUK domestic plus International Tracked & Signed. International claims have a longer adjudication window (90 days vs 30 days for UK).
Claim-age cohortsEach claim has a submittedAt timestamp. The companion histogram P58 Claim Age Distribution buckets by age in days. Royal Mail’s stated turnaround is 30 days for damage / loss; anything beyond is abandoned cash + customer goodwill loss.
CurrencyStored in claim native currency (GBP for UK, may be EUR / USD for international). The companion Claim Value (open) card sums in store base currency using daily FX.
Time windowRT (real-time, snapshot at last sync). Sync runs every 4 hours by default.
Alert trigger>0 unresolved >7d (any claim open more than 7 days). For high-volume merchants, raise threshold to 14 days; the goal is to catch abandoned claims, not noise on every day-old submission.
Rolesowner, operations, finance

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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.
Claim statusCountAggregate declared value
Submitted (0 to 7 days old)14£842
Under review (8 to 30 days old)22£1,318
Awaiting evidence (any age)7£463
Escalated (>30 days, RMG late)9£1,205
All open (this card)52£3,828
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:
CardWhy pair it with Open ClaimsWhat the combination tells you
Claim Value (open)The £ recoverable behind the count.A high count with low value means lots of small claims (untracked-feeling tickets); high count and high value means real cash at risk.
P58 Claim Age DistributionWhere in the lifecycle each claim is.Surfaces the claims past the 30-day window that need escalation.
Exception RateThe upstream funnel (events that may become claims).10 to 25 percent of damage / loss exceptions become claims; a rising exception rate predicts a rising claim count at 14 to 21 days lag.
Late ShipmentsDelay claims feeder.Late Tracked 24 deliveries are claim-eligible at the customer’s request, expect 5 to 10 percent of late Tracked 24 to convert into delay claims.
Failed DeliveriesLost-parcel feeder.E45 “lost in transit” exceptions become loss claims at roughly 80 percent rate.
Cross-connector: shopify.refund_rateCustomer-facing refund pressure.If the merchant pre-refunded customers for damaged / lost parcels, this card represents recoverable cash; reconcile against refunds processed.
Cross-connector: hermes_evri.her_open_claimsAdjacent carrier claims pipeline.Compare per-1000-parcel claim rate; informs which carrier to lean into for high-trust shipments.

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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:
ReasonDirectionWhy
Timezone (BST vs UTC)Boundary days offSubmission timestamps render in BST in the portal, UTC in the card. For the open-count snapshot this rarely matters; for the age histogram it can shift a claim across a day boundary.
Sync lagOurs can lag 4hClaims API sync runs every 4 hours by default. A claim submitted in the last 4 hours may not show in our index.
Status taxonomy mappingEitherRMG’s portal exposes 8+ internal statuses; we collapse them to 4 (submitted, under_review, awaiting_evidence, escalated). A “rejected pending appeal” claim is escalated in our view, “rejected” in the portal.
Cross-connector reconciliation against hermes_evri.her_open_claimsDifferent populationDifferent carriers, different consignments. Useful for portfolio-level comparison of claim-rate-per-1000, not a like-for-like reconciliation.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
CardExpected relationshipCauses of legitimate divergence
shopify.refund_valueThe customer-facing refund half of the same incident.Merchants who pre-refund pay the customer before the carrier claim resolves; the two flows are not 1:1 timed.
shipbob.sb_health_scorePick / pack accuracy upstream.Different scoring; ShipBob handles warehouse, RMG handles last-mile. A damage claim could originate from either party.

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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.