Recently, we ran a freight audit for a company that spends around $2M annually with one carrier. After reviewing shipments, contracts, and invoicing data, we uncovered close to $200,000 in overcharges, about 10% of the total spend.
Most companies assume their invoices are broadly accurate. Maybe there’s a rounding error here, a minor discrepancy there, but nothing material. That’s what we hear a lot.
And then we run the audit.
Recently, we ran a freight audit for a company that spends around $2M annually with one carrier. After reviewing shipments, contracts, and invoicing data, we uncovered close to $200,000 in overcharges, about 10% of the total spend. That was just for one carrier. Across their full book, it’s likely closer to half a million.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s not even unusual. It’s what happens when no one’s checking, because most companies think they don’t need to.
To run a proper audit, you need three types of data:
Most companies have partial visibility across these. Shipment data might live in one system, invoices in another (often still arriving as PDFs), and contract terms, especially amendments and surcharges, are rarely structured or complete.
Even when companies do try to audit manually, they’re usually working with incomplete or aggregated data. We’ve seen customers upload contracts into a TMS that strips out half the details we’d need. Or forward invoices in summary format, which makes it impossible to tie charges back to specific containers or services.
Without complete, granular data across all three sources, audits become guesswork.
That’s the most common reaction. And it’s understandable.
Most companies haven’t seen the numbers, so they assume the margin for error is small. Half a percent, maybe one. That’s not worth the effort. But what we’re seeing is closer to 5–8% across the board, depending on the quality of invoicing and the complexity of the contracts.
Even when we offer to run a post-audit at no cost just to help companies see where things stand, the assumption is often that it won’t uncover much. But it does. Almost every time.
The reason is simple: invoicing processes are messy, and the systems involved don’t talk to each other. Carriers push rate updates frequently. Contracts have rolling amendments. And invoices aren’t always mapped back cleanly to actual shipments.
The ambition here is to improve archaic processes and systems. It’s about having the infrastructure to verify what's correct before the money leaves your account.
There are two main reasons companies hold back:
Both are fair concerns but both are based on outdated assumptions.
At Unity, we’ve built UnityAudit specifically to address those points. We ingest shipment, invoice, and contract data from any source (including PDFs, spreadsheets, APIs, or EDI), stitch it together, and run pre-payment audits that validate every line item against the contractual agreement and actual service delivered.
We’re not asking customers to change their processes. We’re not asking them to clean their data first. We’ve built our platform around the assumption that most supply chain data is messy. That’s our starting point rather than being a blocker.
UnityAudit was designed to audit every invoice before it’s paid, comparing what was billed against what actually happened and what was contractually agreed. No spreadsheets. No manual spot checks. No black-box vendors.
Just real-time auditing powered by an AI agent that understands context across shipments, contracts, and historical disputes.
Beyond catching errors, it’s about creating a closed loop where:
And AI learns from every audit to flag issues faster, with greater accuracy thus improving the entire system with each cycle, moving beyond traditional auditing.
This is agentic AI applied to logistics.
If you’re skeptical, good. You should be. This industry has seen its fair share of empty promises. But here’s the difference: we’ll show you.
Start with a post-audit. Give us your paid invoices. Let us show you what’s hiding in the numbers. No setup. No risk. No sales pitch.
Just proof.
Because once you see the 8% hiding in your freight spend, the decision to move forward isn’t hard. It’s obvious.
Start with audit. Then build the system that learns, improves, and stops the bleeding for good.
