Someone always notices freight spend when it spikes. Almost nobody notices the slow leak that was happening for months.

Freight audit failure rarely looks like a dramatic breakdown. It looks like a $72 detention here, a duplicate LTL invoice there, a fuel surcharge that doesn’t match the rate confirmation, and a few accessorial charges that feel too small to fight. Then quarter-end hits, finance asks why transportation spend is up 6-12%, and ops gets pulled into a room to explain charges we didn’t even approve.

The dirty secret: our documents don’t match our reality

Freight audits fail because the data we rely on was never designed to agree.

Think about how many “sources of truth” we juggle:

• The rate confirmation says one thing.
• The BOL has an outdated NMFC class or missing reference numbers.
• The TMS has the planned charge, not the real charge.
• The carrier invoice reflects what they can bill, not what we agreed to.
• Proof of delivery arrives late, blurry, or not at all.

Now add real-world friction: a cross-dock that changes appointment times, a last-minute liftgate requirement, a consignee that won’t sign clean, or a drayage move where the terminal appointment slips and detention starts ticking. Audits break because we’re trying to reconcile a messy physical operation using paperwork that’s incomplete and systems that don’t talk.

And the pattern repeats because we’ve normalized “good enough” data. If your team is keying in accessorials from email threads, updating charges after the fact, or chasing PODs weekly, you’re not running an audit process. You’re running a recovery process.

What’s making it worse in 2026

Our industry is getting faster, not simpler.

A few shifts are piling on risk:

• More accessorial-heavy freight. Retail appointment compliance, residential delivery, inside delivery, and liftgate requests keep growing as networks push closer to the customer. Accessorial charges are now a meaningful chunk of invoice variance, not an edge case.
• Tighter labor and stricter service expectations. When warehouses run lean, appointment windows get precious and detention gets triggered faster. Detention and layover aren’t just carrier “gotchas” anymore. They’re a predictable byproduct of constrained dock capacity.
• Mode mixing is the new normal. More teams are blending LTL, FTL, partials, intermodal, and final-mile to chase cost and capacity. That mix increases billing complexity, especially when you’re splitting shipments, re-weighing freight, or changing classes.
• Invoice volume is up, tolerance for leakage is down. Even a 1% leakage rate gets ugly at scale. On a $20M annual freight budget, that’s $200K. On $100M, it’s $1M. Most of us have seen variance levels higher than that when audits are mostly manual.

The net effect: we’re not auditing a handful of clean linehaul invoices anymore. We’re auditing a messy combination of linehaul plus a growing stack of accessorials, each requiring proof.

A practical path forward: stop auditing invoices and start auditing events

The teams that get this under control stop treating audit as an accounting task and start treating it as an operational control loop.

Here’s what that looks like:

1) Lock down what “billable” means

If “detention” is allowed, what triggers it? Arrival time at gate? Check-in time? Appointment time? If the carrier’s tariff says one thing and our contract says another, we need to define the rule we’ll enforce.

Write it down. Then configure it into your process.

A tight rule set does two things:

• Reduces arguing with carriers because you’re consistent.
• Reduces internal exceptions because everyone knows what to capture at the dock.

2) Make the BOL and rate confirmation actually usable

Most invoice disputes trace back to basics:

• Missing PO or reference numbers
• Wrong shipper address or consignee name
• Incorrect weight, pallet count, or dimensions
• Wrong accessorial selections at tender

If the BOL is sloppy, the invoice will be “creative.” If the rate confirmation is buried in email, your audit team won’t find it in time.

Practical fix: standardize templates and require key fields before tender. If it slows tendering by 60 seconds but saves 20 minutes of dispute time later, that’s a win.

3) Validate the top leakage categories first

Don’t try to audit everything equally. Most operations see a small set of repeat offenders.

Start with these:

• Duplicate invoices and rebills
• Detention, layover, and truck ordered not used
• LTL reclass and reweigh adjustments
• Fuel surcharge mismatches against contract tables
• Accessorials that should require proof (liftgate, appointment, inside delivery)

A focused audit on the top 5 categories can often reduce invoice variance materially within 30-45 days, even before a full process rebuild.

4) Build an evidence trail at the dock and in the TMS

If we can’t prove it, we can’t win it.

Simple operational upgrades help more than most people expect:

• Capture arrival and departure timestamps consistently.
• Log appointment changes in the TMS, not just in email.
• Attach POD, lumper receipts, and photos to the shipment record.
• Require check-in/check-out on yard management when possible.

This isn’t about surveillance. It’s about reducing “he said, she said” billing.

5) Automate the boring checks so humans handle exceptions

Our teams shouldn’t be manually comparing fuel surcharge percentages or matching PRO numbers all day.

Rules-based automation can handle:

• Contract rate validation
• Duplicate detection
• Tolerance checks for weight and miles
• Accessorial validation against required evidence

Tools like Debales.ai can help teams automate invoice auditing and exception workflows without turning the TMS into a science project. The point isn’t another dashboard. It’s fewer bad invoices getting paid.

What you can do this week (without a big project)

If you want momentum fast, run a one-week audit sprint.

Day 1: Pull a variance report

Grab the last 30 days of invoices and sort by:

• Highest variance vs. expected
• Most frequent accessorial codes
• Carriers with the most rebills

If you don’t have “expected” charges stored, start with a simple benchmark: linehaul rate from the rate confirmation plus contract fuel.

Day 2: Pick three rules and enforce them

Examples that work:

• No detention paid without check-in/check-out timestamps.
• No liftgate paid without it being on the tender or documented by the consignee.
• No LTL reclass accepted without a reweigh/reclass certificate.

Day 3: Fix one document workflow

Choose the biggest pain point:

• Store rate confirmations in a shared folder tied to shipment ID.
• Require BOL reference numbers before tender.
• Add a mandatory field for appointment number.

Make it annoying to skip. That’s how standards stick.

Day 4: Call one carrier and align on proof

Pick your highest-volume carrier and align on what proof you’ll accept. You’re not trying to squeeze them. You’re trying to reduce back-and-forth.

When carriers know you’re consistent, disputes drop.

Day 5: Measure the delta

Track:

• How many invoices were blocked or corrected
• Dollars recovered or avoided
• Top reasons for exceptions

Even a small pilot often shows real money. If you prevent $15K in bad charges in a week, budget conversations get easier.

The shift that matters

Freight audit isn’t a back-office cleanup job. It’s a signal about how well we control our operation.

If invoices are constantly surprising us, it usually means events are happening in the dark: missed appointments, unclear accessorial approvals, undocumented delays, and rate agreements that never made it into the system.

When we start treating freight audit as operational discipline, the surprises fade. And that’s the real goal: not “perfect invoices,” but a network where cost matches intent because execution matches plan.