Freight bill audit is the check of each carrier's bill against the agreed rate and the trip actually made, before the bill is paid. It is also called freight audit. The shipper, or a company that the shipper hires, runs it in software, usually inside or beside its transportation management system.
A trucking bill has several parts. The base freight for the route comes from the contract. Then there are extra charges. Detention is a charge for the time a truck waits at the factory or at the customer beyond the free time the contract allows. There may also be charges for an extra stop, for loading and unloading, and for tolls, if the contract says the shipper pays them. A shipper with thousands of trips a month cannot check every line by hand. Small errors add up over a year, and the same trip is sometimes billed twice.
The software reads each bill, often a PDF or a scanned paper, and pulls out the trip number, the route and each charge. AI models now do much of this reading. The software then compares the bill with three records. The first is the contract rate for that route. The second is the trip record in the TMS, with the truck number and the times at which it arrived and left. The third is the proof of delivery. Matching two sets of records in this way, and explaining every difference, is called reconciliation. Each charge that matches is approved. Each charge that does not match goes to an employee in the logistics team, with the reason.
Take a bicycle maker in Ludhiana that sends a truckload to a distributor in Kolkata. The contract rate for the route is ₹68,000. The transporter's bill asks for ₹78,500: ₹68,000 of freight, ₹6,000 for two days of detention at Kolkata, and ₹4,500 for tolls. The audit software checks the trip record. The truck reached the distributor at 10 a.m. and was unloaded by 6 p.m. the same day. That is 8 hours, well inside the 24 hours of free time in the contract. So the detention charge is rejected. The contract also says that the transporter pays its own tolls, so the toll charge is rejected too. The software approves ₹68,000, and sends the transporter the reasons for the two rejections.
The approved amount then goes to accounts payable automation, which schedules the payment. If the transporter disagrees, it can send evidence, such as a gate record showing a longer wait, and the employee can change the decision. Freight bill audit is one case of invoice audit, the check of any supplier's bill against the order and the delivery. For a one-off trip with no contract rate, some tools compare the bill with the going rates on a load board for the same route.