Freight Audit Automation for a US Logistics Leader
Every invoice, checked to the line and sorted automatically into approve, reject or review. How AI-powered freight audit cut manual effort by 60%, eliminated 90% of errors, and gave a CFO real-time control over freight spend for the first time.
At a Glance
Logistics & Transportation
United States
Automate a manual freight audit process handling every invoice format vendor could send catching overcharges, duplicates and compliance failures that were quietly draining margin, while giving finance a real-time view of profitability.
- 60% reduction in manual effort, with 30% more invoices audited than before.
- 90% fewer errors across data processing and rate calculation.
- 15% improvement in profitability, driven by anomaly detection and smarter pricing.
The Challenge
Freight audit was entirely manual, and it was costing the business twice over. Auditors worked through a chaotic mix of vendor formats PDFs, scanned documents, spreadsheets under constant time pressure, which made human error inevitable. Overcharges, undercharges and duplicate billing slipped through routinely, turning into delayed and duplicated payments that hit the bottom line directly.
The deeper problem was blindness. With no real-time view of margins, the finance team couldn't see which routes were profitable or where freight spend was leaking. They were reconciling the past rather than managing the present and as volumes grew, the manual process had no way to scale with them.
Our Approach
Cozentus built a custom Intelligent Document Processing solution combining AI, machine learning, Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) and OCR, wrapped in a business rule engine and RPA. Invoices arrive from email, SFTP, API or direct upload; corrupted files are automatically bounced back to the sender for correction; CLU detects the language; and the IDP model extracts exactly the fields the audit requires.
The audit itself compares invoiced against audited amounts at both total and line-item level then does the thing that changes the economics of the whole process: it decides what happens next, automatically.
Intelligent Auditing in Action:
- Four-way automated triage: every invoice is sorted without human input into auto-approved (no discrepancies), auto-rejected (critical discrepancies), manual approval (minor issues needing a quick human check), or manual rejection (complex cases or potential fraud). Auditors only see the invoices that genuinely need judgement.
- Real-time financial validation: automated checks for regulatory compliance, currency and duplication run on every invoice, with discrepancies triggering immediate email alerts to the right stakeholder.
- Live margin visibility: an interactive dashboard surfaces invoice status, freight spend and profitability in real time, with validated data flowing straight into the payment system.
Business Outcomes
Efficiency
- 60% reduction in manual rate processing time through RPA
- 30% more invoices audited with the same team
Accuracy & compliance
- Over 90% reduction in manual errors via AI-powered validation
- 90% fewer rate calculation errors and 100% compliance enforced by the business rule engine
Financial impact
- 15% improvement in profitability through predictive analytics and smarter pricing
- Revenue leakage minimised by automated anomaly detection catching discrepancies at source
- 25% fewer pricing disputes through transparent, interactive reporting
Client Quote
Now we have real-time insights into our financials, which helps us make better decisions… We've seen better control over costs, and the transparency has really improved. This solution has helped us scale and manage our freight spending much more effectively.
Related Case Studies
Ready to Transform Your Supply Chain?
Let's discuss how our AI-powered solutions can help you optimize operations and drive measurable results. Our team is ready to understand your unique challenges.