The cumbersome time investment of freight auditing has always been its biggest obstacle. It’s why so many carriers have digitized the process in recent years. Digital freight auditing is a step in the right direction, but it requires comprehensive oversight.

Companies can’t just focus on one aspect of cost reconciliation — they need to recognize the many avenues and opportunities for auditing. That means working with an auditing partner who takes a comprehensive, top-down view of digital freight auditing.

Why Choose an Digital Auditing Partner?

Think about how many thousands of checks go into freight auditing. Consider how many errors can arise when a decimal point is misplaced, the wrong rate is entered, or an invoice is incorrectly submitted. Immense manpower goes into resolving these issues, and it might cost dollars to save pennies.

Now, imagine a digital platform that can audit invoices and probe for discrepancies. If the numbers don’t match up, an algorithm performs a series of checks across the dozens of variables a human might manually check. When it finds a discrepancy, it executes a process to identify the problem. This algorithm might perform hundreds of checks on tens of thousands of variables over the span of just a few hours — a task that takes humans days or weeks of time and tens of thousands of dollars each year to accomplish.

Freight auditing partners have access to these types of technologies and the proprietary auditing algorithms that power them. Through a partnership, you’re spending pennies to save thousands. It’s a bottom-line boost no shipper can argue with.

What to Look from an Digital Audit Partner?

The goal in working with a freight auditing partner is simple: recapture otherwise lost dollars through smarter reconciliation. But with so much dense freight data to comb through, not every auditing partner offers the same value proposition. For a freight auditing partner to be truly valuable, they need to offer a gamut of solutions capable of breaking down and processing dense freight data at-scale — whether it’s a few hundred reconciliations or a few hundred thousand.

The best next-generation digital auditing partners are those who understand how to leverage smart technologies and resources to rapidly and accurately process invoices. Some of the chief features to look for in an auditing partner include:

• Ability to vet invoices, contracts, rate cards, tariffs/agreements, and coding logic.
• Business intelligence analytical tools with enriched normalized data.
• Integration into a Transportation Management System (TMS) for quick import/export data tracking.
• Electronic data interchange (EDI) images considered value-added tax (VAT) compliant in EMEA (Europe, Middle-East, Africa)/APAC (Asia Pacific) regions.
• Non-commingled remittances in any commonly traded currency.
• Data capture, including dedicated customer defined data fields.

The amount of data associated with freight transportation invoices is only growing. Auditing is about more than matching up costs — it’s about combing through the many layers of dense data to figure out exactly why they don’t match. Faster, smarter, more accurate reconciliation doesn’t just save companies money; it helps them operate leaner.