3PL Status Reporting: Getting the Right Answers Fast Without Chasing Emails

Status reporting is how you keep fulfillment from becoming a mystery

3PL status reporting matters because fulfillment has too many moving parts to manage with guesswork. Research shows that as order volume grows, brands need faster clarity on what is happening across receiving, picking, packing, shipping, and delivery. When status reporting is slow or vague, teams lose time. Customer support escalates. Planning becomes reactive. The business ends up spending labor just to learn basic facts.

Many brands come to G10 after living in a reporting loop that felt like a bad sitcom. They asked for order status and got a spreadsheet later. They asked for inventory updates and got a different spreadsheet. They asked why an order was late and got a guess. 3PL status reporting should give answers that are timely, consistent, and provable.

As Maureen Milligan said, "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements. So we've seen a lot of people come disillusioned by their last 3PL, where their orders weren't getting fulfilled in time, their inventory accuracy was not there, and they were not able to satisfy customer orders." Status reporting fixes that access-to-data pain when it is built into daily operations instead of treated like a special request.

Status reporting has to be real time to be operational, not historical

Status reporting that arrives late is not reporting, it is a recap. Research shows that delayed updates increase missed cutoffs and customer-facing surprises because teams make decisions on stale information. Real time status reporting gives you the chance to intervene early, not apologize later.

Maureen described what customers should be able to monitor when she said, "We're in the last stages of developing a new portal that will give customers real-time visibility to their on-time order fulfillment, inventory accuracy, and even inventory levels so that they can monitor those things directly in our systems." When reporting is delivered through a portal, it becomes part of daily decision-making rather than a periodic report.

She also said, "A lot of the 3PL customer expectations are that order fulfillment is happening extremely timely, that our inventory is accurate, that we're able to execute on their orders very quickly, and get them shipped the same day. So what these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." Status reporting is a key part of that visibility because it turns performance into something measurable.

Order status reporting should follow the full warehouse lifecycle

Order status reporting should not stop at shipped or not shipped. It should show the lifecycle inside the warehouse: received, released, picked, packed, labeled, and shipped. Research shows that issue resolution improves when teams can identify where an order slowed down instead of debating the cause.

Bryan Wright described what lifecycle visibility looks like when he said, "Absolutely. We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking. It shows the product landed on the dock at 8 o'clock. At 8:10, John picked it up and took it to location XYZ, and at 10 o'clock, we picked two items off of that pellet in the location 1, 2, 3, 4, order, you know, ABC, and at 11 o'clock, we packed it, we put it in this box and put this label number on it, and all the way through the process onto the truck and to the customer." Status reporting becomes far more useful when it includes time-stamped milestones like these.

Inventory status reporting must include accuracy signals

Inventory status reporting is not just a count. Research shows that inventory issues often come from accuracy drift and state confusion, not from a lack of product. Reporting should show inventory levels, inventory states, and accuracy trends so teams know what is available, what is allocated, and what is not sellable.

Scan-based execution is what keeps these reports truthful. If inventory moves without being captured, reports become fiction.

As Connor Perkins said, "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper. You can lose a lot of money in this industry by you know having people ship stuff wrong, or store it wrong, and now it's lost somewhere. So having a 3PL and WMS that is 100% scan-based is crucial." Status reporting depends on this because the system needs accurate events to report on.

Connor also said, "One of the pain points our clients have experienced with previous 3PLSs is inventory accuracy; maybe their previous 3PL wasn't great at picking the orders accurately. So they were losing money by shipping wrong items or wrong quantities of items." Status reporting helps spot accuracy risk earlier, but scan-based execution reduces how often those errors happen.

KPIs matter, but drilldowns matter more

KPIs are useful for steering, but they do not explain what changed. Research shows that teams resolve issues faster when they can drill into transaction history behind a KPI. Status reporting should connect summary views to details, so performance conversations can move from opinions to evidence.

As Connor said, "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions. They can look at a daily level or go into the more granular version where they're looking at transactional history on an item." Good status reporting includes that path from KPI to transaction history.

He also said, "You have easy access to reporting and you can export to Excel, or really any format that you like you know directly from our WMS portal." Exportable reporting matters because teams need to share data across operations, finance, and customer support.

Status reporting should surface exceptions, not hide them

Status reporting is most valuable when it highlights exceptions. Research shows that proactive exception visibility reduces customer-facing failures because teams can intervene before delays turn into missed ship dates. Exceptions include short inventory, failed picks, late receiving, carrier scan gaps, and routing issues.

When exceptions are visible, support teams spend less time chasing updates, and operations teams spend less time firefighting. That is the difference between a system that reports and a system that helps manage.

Status reporting supports B2B compliance and HAZMAT accountability

Status reporting becomes even more important in B2B and regulated flows. Research shows that compliance failures create chargebacks, rejected shipments, and costly disputes. Status reporting should support accountability by making routing milestones and documentation traceable, and by showing exceptions early.

For HAZMAT, visibility is also part of responsible handling because traceability supports accountability when questions arise.

How G10 approaches 3PL status reporting

G10 was founded in 2009, and we built our ChannelPoint WMS to support B2B and D2C ecommerce, retail, wholesale, and HAZMAT-compliant fulfillment with same-day shipping, custom capabilities, and retailer integration. Status reporting works best when it is delivered through portals and dashboards, built on scan-based execution, and backed by transaction history.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." Status reporting should give you answers you can act on quickly, without chasing emails or waiting for someone to build a custom report.

If you want to see what status reporting looks like when order milestones, inventory states, KPIs, and transaction history are available in real time, ask for a walkthrough of ChannelPoint that maps your reporting gaps to a clearer, more defensible visibility model.