For logistics & cross-border freight
Carrier invoices that do not match the rate you agreed. Bills of lading arriving as phone photos. Customs packets assembled by hand, twice. This is the most document-dense industry we work in, and the arithmetic is rarely close.
The margin leaks
one invoice at a time.
A carrier invoice arrives. Somebody should check it against the rate confirmation, the accessorials that were actually authorised, the fuel surcharge for that week, and the weight on the bill of lading. In practice, past a certain volume, somebody checks the big ones and approves the rest — because checking properly takes five minutes and there are four thousand of them.
That gap is not a rounding error. It is a persistent, compounding leak that nobody can size, because sizing it would require doing the checking you already decided you cannot afford to do.
Freight bill audit is unusual among automation projects: it does not only remove labour cost, it recovers money that was already leaving. Those are two separate lines in the business case and they should be argued separately.
Two benefits, argued separately
Take a brokerage or 3PL handling 4,000 carrier invoices a month. A proper manual check runs about five minutes each — that is 333 hours, or roughly CAD $12,600 a month in loaded time at the $36–40/hour figure we publish. Most operations simply do not spend that, which is precisely why the second benefit exists.
The recovery line is yours to estimate, not ours to assert. We will not put an industry-average overbilling percentage on this page, because we have not measured your carriers and neither has anyone quoting you one.
What the assessment does instead: run a real sample of your recent invoices against your own rate agreements and count the discrepancies. That gives you a recovery figure derived from your data, which is the only kind worth putting in a business case.
Why accuracy is worth more here
In most document automation, an error costs you a correction. In freight audit, a false positive costs you a carrier relationship — you have just disputed a charge that was legitimate, and somebody at the other end has to be told you were wrong.
So the threshold is set differently. We tune the exception rules to under-flag rather than over-flag, and the evaluation set is scored on both misses and false disputes. Which of those hurts you more is a business decision, and it is yours to make before we build.
What we automate first
Ordered by how quickly the payback tends to arrive.
Freight bill audit
Carrier invoices reconciled against the rate confirmation, authorised accessorials, fuel schedule and the weight and class on the shipping paperwork. Discrepancies over a threshold you set become an exception with the evidence attached, ready to dispute — not a silent approval.
BOL & POD capture
Bills of lading and proofs of delivery read from whatever arrives — scans, faxes, driver phone photos taken at an angle in a dark trailer — matched to the shipment record, with signature presence and delivery date extracted. Unreadable items are queued, never guessed at.
Customs document packets
Commercial invoices, packing lists and origin documentation checked for internal consistency and completeness before the packet is filed, so a missing field surfaces at your desk rather than at the border. We prepare and validate documentation; we do not provide customs brokerage or classification advice.
Rate & quote intake
Inbound rate requests and tenders parsed into structured lanes, equipment types and dates so they land in your TMS as records rather than as an inbox someone works through.
Write into your TMS
Posted into your transportation management or accounting system through its API, or produced as a validated import where no API exists. Every write carries a link to the source document that produced it, which is what makes a dispute defensible six months later.
Shipment data crosses the border. Deciding where it rests is still your call.
Cross-border operators carry commercial terms, customer lists, pricing and counterparty details in their document flow. Much of it is commercially sensitive even where it is not personal information, and shipper agreements increasingly say something specific about where it may be stored and who may see it.
We are incorporated in Ontario and work across Canada and the United States. Deployment goes into a Canadian region, a U.S. region, your own cloud tenancy, or your own hardware — named in the statement of work rather than left to a vendor's default.
If a shipper has asked you where their rate data is processed and you had to guess, that is the question this answers.
What we commit to on dataWorking hours are part of the spec
Freight breaks in real time. A document pipeline that stalls at 06:00 Eastern needs somebody awake at 06:00 Eastern, not a ticket answered when the next continent opens.
We work Eastern time. That is not a claim about anyone else's quality — plenty of excellent teams operate elsewhere. It is a statement about overlap, and in this industry overlap is an operational requirement rather than a preference.
The same published prices as everything else
Prices in Canadian dollars, verified 23 August 2026. An advisory hour is CAD $195; fixed-scope advisory engagements start at CAD $4,500; minimum build engagement is CAD $9,500.
- Start here
- Automation Readiness Assessment — $12,500 (credited in full against a build within 90 days). For freight audit this includes running a real sample of your invoices against your rate agreements, so you get a recovery estimate from your own data.
- The build
- From $26,000 for one document type across two intake sources; $48,000 for three document types with separate rule sets and a full review queue. Freight audit plus BOL/POD capture is typically the second tier.
- Running it
- $2,400 or $4,800 a month for hosting in your chosen region, monitoring, incident response and a monthly re-run of your evaluation set.
When you should not buy this
When your TMS already audits freight bills. Several transportation management systems include rate reconciliation, and some 3PLs get it bundled without realising. Check what you are already paying for before you commission a build — this is the most common reason we tell logistics prospects to keep their money.
When a freight audit firm on contingency fits better. There is an established industry that does this for a percentage of recoveries and no upfront cost. If your volume is modest or you would rather not own software, that is a genuinely reasonable choice and we will point you toward it. Owning the system wins at sustained volume, when the percentage starts to exceed what a build would have cost.
Under roughly 500 documents a month. The arithmetic does not clear our minimum.
When your rate agreements are not written down consistently. A system can only reconcile against rules that exist. If accessorial terms live in email threads and individual relationships, that is the first project — and it is one you can do without us.
Questions worth asking first
The answers below restate what is already set out on this page — the scope limits, the published prices, and where your data is allowed to live.
What does it cost to start?
The Automation Readiness Assessment is $12,500, credited in full against a build within 90 days; for freight audit it includes running a real sample of your invoices against your rate agreements. The build is from $26,000 for one document type across two intake sources, or $48,000 for three document types with separate rule sets and a full review queue. Running it is $2,400 or $4,800 a month. Prices in Canadian dollars, verified 23 August 2026, minimum engagement CAD $9,500.
How much are we losing to carrier overbilling?
The recovery line is yours to estimate, not ours to assert. We will not put an industry-average overbilling percentage on this page, because we have not measured your carriers and neither has anyone quoting you one. What the assessment does instead is run a real sample of your recent invoices against your own rate agreements and count the discrepancies — a recovery figure derived from your data, which is the only kind worth putting in a business case.
What happens if it disputes a charge that was legitimate?
That is the failure mode we tune against. In freight audit a false positive costs you a carrier relationship — you have just disputed a charge that was legitimate, and somebody at the other end has to be told you were wrong. So we tune the exception rules to under-flag rather than over-flag, and the evaluation set is scored on both misses and false disputes. Which of those hurts you more is a business decision, and it is yours to make before we build.
Do you handle customs brokerage or classification?
No. We prepare and validate documentation; we do not provide customs brokerage or classification advice. What we do is check commercial invoices, packing lists and origin documentation for internal consistency and completeness before the packet is filed, so a missing field surfaces at your desk rather than at the border.
Where does our shipment data get processed?
In a Canadian region, a U.S. region, your own cloud tenancy, or your own hardware — named in the statement of work rather than left to a vendor's default. The Canadian options are AWS ca-central-1 (Montreal) or Azure Canada Central (Toronto). If a shipper has asked you where their rate data is processed and you had to guess, that is the question this answers.
Start with fifty invoices
Fifty recent carrier invoices and the rate agreements they should match. That sample tells us — and you — whether there is money in this before anyone commits to a build.
See the assessment