Freight invoices get approved against a threshold, not against the contract. REFRAKT checks every line against the terms you actually signed — and holds the ones that do not match, before the payment is released.
Once the payment is out, a wrong line becomes a claim against a carrier who already holds the cash — and the party with the money sets the pace of the conversation. REFRAKT sits before the release. A disputed line is held; the rest of the invoice pays on time.
Line haul checked against the contracted lane rate for the date the shipment actually moved.
Fuel surcharge recomputed from the index and formula written into the agreement, not accepted as billed.
Waiting time, re-icing and conditioning checked against what the contract already covers — including the cold-chain lines generic freight tools file under “other charges”.
One temperature-controlled shipment, Frankfurt to Milan. Five lines, three of them wrong.
The fuel surcharge is billed at 18.5% where the contract caps it at the published index of 14.2% — €105.35 on this shipment alone. Waiting time is billed for all three hours on site, although the first two are free under the agreement. Re-icing is billed at €120.00 despite being included in the contracted rate.
Line haul and the temperature-controlled service both match, and pass without a human ever looking at them. That is the point: the finance team sees three lines, not five.
Total: +€315.35 above contract, 9.8% of this invoice. Not recovered next quarter. Not paid.
Illustrative example on constructed figures. Your own exposure depends on your contracts and your carriers.
We are. Turning rate cards, agreements and amendments into structured, versioned terms is the part that stops most finance teams from ever starting — so it is not the part we hand back to you. You confirm what we extracted; you do not transcribe it.
Terms are versioned, so a shipment is always checked against the agreement that was in force on the day it moved, not the one in force today.
An audit firm's working estimate puts 5–10% of freight and parcel invoices as carrying some kind of error, with recoveries typically landing between 2–8% of audited freight spend.
Two caveats we would rather state than have you find: that is an experience-based estimate from a firm that sells audits, not a measured study. And the “up to 20%” figure that circulates in this industry has no verifiable primary source, so we do not repeat it.
Source: Freight Invoice Audit (2026), citing a Tompkins Ventures estimate.
| Today | With REFRAKT |
|---|---|
| Invoices approved above a value threshold | Every line checked, every invoice |
| Contract terms in PDFs across three folders | Structured and versioned by shipment date |
| A dispute lives in one person's inbox | An exception is a record with an owner and a deadline |
| The whole invoice is held over one line | The disputed line is held; the rest pays on time |
| “Someone in payables looked at it” | An audit trail showing what was compared, against which version |
REFRAKT is part of the TERMINUS platform, which also carries the quality side of the same shipment. That makes one question answerable that normally is not: did we pay for a temperature that was not actually held?
Bring a recent freight invoice and the contract behind it. We will check it line by line on a 30-minute call and you keep the result either way.
