The rate card checks invoices; people argue the exceptions

The question this file answersWe pay hundreds of carrier invoices a month — how many of them are actually right, and who checks?

Fits: shippers and forwarders auditing hundreds to thousands of carrier invoices a month against contracts and rate cards, mostly by hand

Not for: operators already running a freight audit provider or paying carriers on self-billing — the manual match is not your cost

Typical day

What the desk looks like today

Typical, from the logistics playbook. Hundreds to thousands of carrier invoices a month arrive as PDFs in a shared mailbox. A clerk opens each, finds the rate card for that carrier and route, compares the charges to the shipment record in the TMS, flags what does not add up, emails the carrier for a correction and, weeks later, approves what is left. Nobody checks every line on a busy month; what slips through is paid at the carrier's price. It hurts most when a carrier issues a new rate card and every line from it becomes an argument.

What changes

What Monday looks like after

The morning after a carrier's monthly statement lands, the clerk does not start by opening the statement PDF. Lines that match the contract are already approved and sitting in the ERP for the payment run; on the screen is the dispute list — a route priced off the old rate card, an accessorial nobody agreed, a shipment the TMS has no record of. The clerk's day is those conversations with carriers, which is where the money is. You can see, per carrier, how many lines passed and how many were argued. Ardent Partners (2023) describes best-in-class freight audit; that is their figure in the metric block, not a promise for month one.

Typical, not a measured client result. Every figure here comes from the playbook source named below.

~50–65%

less manual invoice-checking — Transporeon/project44 client cases

Before: a clerk matches every carrier invoice to rate cards and shipments by hand. After: published client cases report 50–65% less manual audit effort — their number, not our measurement.

Where this number comes from

Transporeon and project44 publish client cases with 50–65% less manual audit effort; Ardent Partners' “Freight Audit” study (2023) puts best-in-class at 75%+ touchless. Playbook range 50–70%. Other operators' published results, not our measurement.

What we install

What we put in front of the systems you already run

Nothing new on either side — SAP TM, Transporeon, CargoWise, Alpega or the TMS you run keeps the shipment records; your ERP keeps the payment run. In front of approval we add a checking step:

each carrier invoice is read from the mailbox or carrier portal, line by line
every line is matched to the contract rate for that route and service and to the shipment record in the TMS
lines inside the tolerance you set are approved and passed to the ERP through its API or your existing import
lines that disagree go to a dispute list with the three figures side by side and the difference named, ready for the email to the carrier.

First scope: the biggest carriers.

What stays human — and what this will not do

Dispute resolution with the carrier. Contract renegotiation. New carrier set-up. Anything outside the tolerance you set.

What can go wrong — and what we do about it

If a rate card lives in a spreadsheet nobody updated when the contract changed, the match is against the wrong price and the dispute list fills with false alarms — audit work first. Carrier PDFs differ in layout and change without notice; a new template fails extraction and waits for a person. Without an API on the TMS or ERP, approvals go through import files and need IT time. Disputes, renegotiation and new carrier set-up stay manual; the playbook's 50–70% is the range on checking effort, not on what the disputes are worth.

How long it takes, and what we need from you

Audit, about two weeks (€1.5–3K): we sit with whoever approves carrier invoices, count a recent month by carrier, check that the rate cards exist in a system, and see what your TMS and ERP expose. Pilot, 3–5 weeks (€10–20K), medium complexity in the logistics playbook: the top carriers, the clerk sees every disputed line, nothing is paid without the usual approval. Production: the rest of the carriers, then accessorials. From you: mailbox or portal access, the contracts and rate cards, a month of paid invoices.

The path: free 60-second estimate → free 20-minute review → paid audit of this one process (€1.5–3K, typically two weeks) → pilot with your people in the loop (€10–20K, weeks, not quarters). No transformation programme. Prices are public, on the services page →

This is about you if…

Do carrier invoices still get checked against the rate card by a person, line by line?
Are the rate cards and contracts already in a system, not only in a drawer?
Is it hundreds of invoices a month or more?

What does this mean in euros?

That depends on your volumes and wage costs — this page will not invent the number. The free 60-second estimate runs that calculation from your answers, with every multiplier sourced.

Get your free savings estimate 60 seconds · no sales call Or write first → Map a logistics process like this one — free, 60 seconds →

Not a named Aperanda client. Process file · Logistics.

Deep-dive process file. Volumes, weeks and sources come from the industry playbook; nothing here is a named client.

All process files