The Problem
Carriers make billing errors. A wrong rate. A duplicate charge. An accessorial that was never contracted but shows up on every invoice. A gradual drift upward on a specific lane that nobody notices because no single invoice looks wrong. Your AP team approves invoices because they don't have the time or the data to audit every line against the contract and every line against what you usually pay. The errors compound. Overcharges turn into accepted practice. Undercharges pass through and your customer pays less than the terms say. Margin leaks everywhere.
What This Can Do For You
Automated freight audit that catches the mistakes before approval, and the drift before it becomes normal. The system audits every invoice against contractual rates daily, and compares every invoice against rolling historical benchmarks weekly. The design is flexible to your operation:
Possibilities
- Contract rate validation: every invoice checked against the contracted rate for that customer/carrier/lane. Anything off gets flagged before approval.
- Historical drift detection: rolling benchmarks across carrier, lane, weight bracket, and freight class. Catches rates quietly creeping up even when each individual invoice "looks fine."
- Accessorial auditing: flags accessorials (liftgate, inside delivery, limited access, residential) that appear without itemization or weren't in the original quote.
- Margin protection both ways: catches carrier overcharges AND undercharges to your customer. Both leak margin.
- Custom thresholds: variance tolerance set per account, per lane, or per carrier based on how tight your margins are and how much noise you'll accept.
- Prioritized review queue: your team gets a short, ranked list of the highest-dollar-impact items to investigate each week, not a dump of every variance.
What You Get
- Stop paying invoices that are wrong: overcharges caught before approval, not after the money is out the door.
- Hard data for carrier negotiations: specific shipments, specific variances. Not anecdotes.
- Protected margin: undercharges to your customer get flagged too, so terms are enforced both ways.
- Trend visibility: quietly rising lanes surface before they become your new normal.
- AP team focused on real exceptions: not rubber-stamping invoices, not auditing blindly.