Freight claims and freight audit: what you can actually recover, and by when
Filing deadlines and liability caps for six legal regimes, the eight ways a carrier invoice goes wrong, and the arithmetic that tells you which claims and which disputes are worth the hours they cost.
You have a claim right now
- 9 months to file, 2 years from denial to sue (US interstate truck and rail)
- Note the damage on the delivery receipt before the driver leaves — everything else is administration
- Concealed damage: 5 business days in most carrier tariffs
You are looking at an invoice you think is wrong
- Eight discrepancy types, and which three are actually the carrier's fault
- How to short-pay a variance without breaking the carrier relationship
- What audit-and-pay providers cost, and the volume where they stop paying off
Freight claims and freight audit, defined
A freight claim is a formal written demand for payment from a carrier for goods lost, damaged, or short on a shipment it carried. For US interstate truck and rail you have at least 9 months from delivery to file it, and 2 years from the carrier's written denial to sue. A freight audit is the separate discipline of checking a carrier's invoice against the contract before you pay it.
They leak money in the same place. A claim recovers value the carrier destroyed. An audit stops you paying for value the carrier never delivered. Both are decided by documents, both run on hard deadlines, and at most mid-sized shippers both are somebody's third priority.
That is usually an org problem before it is a process problem. Claims sit with a logistics coordinator who files them between booking loads. Audit sits with an AP clerk who checks whether the invoice total looks like the quote. Neither reports to the person whose freight budget both of them are protecting, and neither has thirty uninterrupted minutes to pull a bill of lading, a signed delivery receipt, a scale ticket, and a rate table into the same place. So claims get written off under a threshold and invoices get paid because approving them is faster than questioning them.
Recovery is one-time. Root cause is recurring. Every dollar in this guide can be chased twice — once as a refund, once as a charge that never happens again — and the second one is worth more.
The two numbers
If you are a 3PL, read this from both directions
The clock starts at delivery, not on the day someone finally opens the pallet. Nine months sounds like room to work, which is exactly why most expired claims were never denied — they were just never filed.
Claim deadlines and liability caps by mode
Six regimes, one shared time axis anchored on the day of delivery. The clocks are not comparable lengths, and the short ones are nearly invisible.
The time axis is compressed after day 30 so that short notice windows stay readable. Notice windows come from the governing convention or the carrier's tariff; ocean filing windows are set by the bill of lading. The table below carries the exact language.
The deadline that matters is the one in the governing regime, not the one in your process document. Mode changes everything: an ocean claim you had a year to bring dies at month 13, while the same cargo moving by truck would still be inside the Carmack window.
Under Carmack, the carrier is close to strictly liable, which is why the deadlines are the main battleground. You establish a prima facie case with three facts: the goods were tendered to the carrier in good condition, they arrived damaged or short, and here is the amount of the loss. The carrier then has five defenses, and only five: act of God, act of a public enemy, act of the shipper, act of a public authority, and inherent vice or the nature of the goods themselves. In practice, act of the shipper is the one that kills claims, and it usually means inadequate packaging.
Liability caps are the second surprise. Carmack says actual value, but LTL carriers publish released-value limits in their rules tariffs, commonly $2 to $25 per pound depending on class and commodity, sometimes with a per-shipment maximum. Ocean is worse: COGSA's $500 per package limit was set in 1936 and has never been indexed, so a pallet of electronics declared as one package is worth $500 to the carrier no matter what the commercial invoice says. Air is cleaner but still capped by weight, not value. If your cargo is worth more than the cap, the answer is declared value or cargo insurance, purchased before the shipment moves, not a better claim letter afterwards.
A note for Canadian shippers: provincial standard conditions of carriage set a much shorter notice window than Carmack. Ontario requires written notice within 60 days of delivery for damage or shortage. Sixty days sounds generous until an invoice dispute with your customer surfaces the shortage on day 71.
| Mode / legal regime | Notice of loss or damage | Deadline to file the claim | Deadline to sue | Default liability cap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| US interstate truck & rail (Carmack, 49 U.S.C. § 14706) | Noted on the delivery receipt at delivery; concealed damage per carrier tariff, commonly 5 business days | 9 months from delivery (statutory minimum) | 2 years from written disallowance | Actual value, subject to the carrier's released-value limits, commonly $2 to $25 per lb by class |
| Ocean, US trades (COGSA) | At delivery, or within 3 days if the damage is not apparent | Per the bill of lading | 1 year from delivery or the date goods should have been delivered | US$500 per package or customary freight unit unless value is declared |
| Ocean, Hague-Visby trades | Within 3 days of delivery | Per the bill of lading | 1 year | 666.67 SDR per package or 2 SDR per kg, whichever is higher |
| Air (Montreal Convention) | 14 days from receipt for damage; 21 days for delay | Same written complaint window | 2 years from arrival or scheduled arrival | 26 SDR per kg since the December 2024 revision, roughly US$34-35 at recent SDR rates |
| Canada, Ontario road (standard conditions of carriage) | 60 days after delivery for damage or shortage | 60 days after delivery; 9 months from the shipment date for non-delivery | Per the provincial limitation statute (2 years in Ontario) | CAD $4.41 per kg ($2.00 per lb) unless a higher value is declared on the bill of lading |
| Parcel (UPS, FedEx, DHL tariffs) | Per tariff; damage notice windows run 21 to 60 days | Commonly 9 months from delivery, or from the scheduled delivery date for a loss | Per tariff and contract | US$100 declared-value default on most domestic services; more only if declared and paid for |
The other clock
The 1936 cap
The freight claims process, step by step
The claim is won or lost in the first 20 minutes at the receiving dock. Everything after that is administration.
Note the exception on the delivery receipt, before the driver leaves.
Write what you see, specifically: “2 cartons crushed, top tier”, “1 pallet leaning, shrink wrap torn”, “3 of 12 cartons short”. Then sign. A clean POD is a written statement from your own company that the goods arrived in good order, and carriers will quote it back to you for the next nine months. “Subject to inspection” scrawled on every receipt is not a notation; carriers discount it and so do courts.
Stop the bleeding and preserve the evidence.
You have a duty to mitigate. Do not throw away packaging, do not repack, do not move damaged product to a different building. Photograph the freight on the trailer if you can, then on the dock:
- The pallet as a whole, from two sides
- The damage close up, with something for scale
- The carton labels and the piece count
- The seal number and the trailer number
Report concealed damage immediately.
Concealed damage is damage found after a clean POD was signed. Most carrier tariffs give you 5 business days, some 15. Every day of delay strengthens the carrier's argument that the damage happened in your warehouse. Call, then confirm in writing the same day, and request an inspection.
Assemble the file.
Bill of lading, delivery receipt with the exception notation, the carrier's freight bill, the commercial invoice or cost documentation proving value, the packing list, the photos, the inspection report if one was done, and repair or replacement invoices. If you are claiming salvage, document what the salvage recovered.
A note on short-paying
On the audit side, the practical lever is not a dispute letter, it is the remittance. You approve the portion you agree with, short-pay the variance, and code the deduction so the carrier's AR team knows exactly what you disputed and why. Done cleanly — line-item reason code, reference to the contract clause, sent the same day as the payment — it resolves in one cycle. Done as a silent underpayment, it comes back as a balance-due notice in ninety days, then a collections call, then a service hold at your worst possible moment. Whether your contract permits short-pay at all is in the payment-terms clause. Check before your first one, not after.
File in writing, inside the window.
The claim must identify the shipment, assert liability, and demand a specific dollar amount. Nine months is the statutory floor for US interstate motor and rail, but do not use it as a target. File within 30 days while the freight, the photos, and the people who saw it are all still available.
Hold the carrier to its own clock.
Under 49 CFR 370, the carrier must acknowledge your claim in writing within 30 days of receipt, and must pay, decline, or make a firm settlement offer within 120 days. If it cannot resolve within 120 days, it owes you a written status update every 60 days after that. Most shippers never cite this and it is free leverage.
Escalate or sue.
A written disallowance starts a 2-year clock. That is a long runway, which is exactly why claims go stale in a folder and expire. Put a date on it the day the denial arrives.
30
Days to acknowledge
120
Days to pay, deny, or offer
60
Days per status update after
49 CFR 370
If you also run supplier scorecards, note that this file is the same evidence base you need for OTIF disputes. Same documents, different argument.
The documentation that decides the claim
Carriers do not deny claims because they dispute your version of events. They deny claims because the file does not prove the three things Carmack requires: good condition at tender, bad condition at delivery, and a documented amount.
Good condition at tender
The bill of lading, with piece count, weight, and packaging described — plus an origin photo or a signed pick-and-pack record.
Bad condition at delivery
The annotated delivery receipt and the photographs. Nothing else substitutes.
A documented amount
Cost documentation, not a price list. Landed cost of the goods, net of whatever salvage recovers.
Good condition at tender is proven by the bill of lading and, ideally, an origin photo or a signed pick and pack record. If your BOL says “1 pallet, said to contain” and nothing else, you have already conceded the first element. Piece count, weight, packaging description, and any special handling instructions all belong on the document at origin. Bad condition at delivery is proven by the annotated delivery receipt and the photographs — an email from a warehouse supervisor three days later describing crushed cartons is testimony, not evidence.
The amount is proven by cost, not price. Carriers pay actual loss, which almost always means your landed cost of the goods, not your selling price and not the margin you expected. They will refuse lost profit and consequential damages (the production line you stopped, the retailer penalty you incurred) unless those were specifically contracted for. They will also net out any salvage value the damaged goods retain, and many will insist on handling the salvage themselves.
A useful discipline: the claim file should be assembled at the moment of the exception, not reconstructed later. When a claim gets reconstructed, someone spends two to three hours pulling the BOL from the TMS, the POD scan from a shared drive, the commercial invoice from the ERP, and the photos from a phone that has since been reassigned. That reconstruction cost is what makes small claims uneconomic, and it is the reason most shippers write off anything under a couple of hundred dollars. Hold on to that idea, because the arithmetic in the next section turns on it.
Carrier claim or cargo policy?
Once you see a released-value cap, the real question is which pocket you claim from. Against the carrier you recover landed cost minus salvage, capped by the tariff, and it costs you hours plus some goodwill. Against your own all-risk cargo policy you recover closer to commercial value, but you carry a deductible — commonly $1,000 to $5,000 per occurrence — and a claims history that reprices at renewal.
- Under the deductible: carrier only.
- Between the deductible and the tariff cap: carrier only, because filing on the policy buys you nothing and costs you a claims record.
- Well above the cap on high-value freight: both, with the carrier claim filed first and the insurer subrogating against the tariff cap.
And the decision that actually mattered was made before the shipment moved — declaring value on the bill of lading, at a rate you paid for, is the only thing that lifts the cap, and no claim letter substitutes for it afterwards.
The exposure the claim never covers
What carriers pay
Worked example: what a $9,600 claim actually pays
You ship 3 pallets of finished consumer goods, 84 cases, landed cost $800 per case. The shipment moves US interstate LTL. At delivery, your receiver notes on the POD: “1 pallet collapsed, 12 cases crushed.” Photos taken. Carrier inspection requested and completed.
- Documented loss — 12 cases × $800
- $9,600
- Salvage recovery on the crushed cases
- −$1,200
- Net loss after salvage
- $8,400
- Rules-tariff released value for this class
- $10.00 / lb
- Weight of the damaged cases — 12 × 42 lb
- 504 lb
- Liability cap — 504 × $10.00
- $5,040
- Carrier pays — min($8,400, $5,040)
- $5,040
You recover 52.5% of the documented loss. Freight charges on the damaged portion are not refunded, because the shipment was delivered. Nobody did anything wrong: the POD was annotated, the photos were taken, the claim was filed inside the window. The cap simply is what it is.
Now change one variable. Suppose the receiver signed clean and the damage was found on day 8, past the carrier's 5-business-day concealed damage window. Expected recovery drops to roughly zero.
The difference was 20 seconds of pen work at the dock.
Which claims are worth filing at all
File when L × r > c → break-even L = c ÷ r
- L = documented loss, r = expected recovery rate after caps and salvage, c = fully loaded cost to assemble and pursue the claim.
- Realistic inputs: an analyst at $85,000 fully loaded is $41/hour across 2,080 hours. At 2.5 hours to assemble and pursue, c ≈ $102.
- Assume a well-documented claim recovers r ≈ 0.55 — the worked example above landed at 52.5%, and 0.55 is the middle of what caps and salvage typically leave.
- Break-even: 102 ÷ 0.55 = $185.
That single line explains the write-off thresholds sitting in most claims policies. The lever in that formula is not the recovery rate. It is c. You cannot argue a carrier past its released-value cap, but you can change how long it takes your own team to assemble a file. Run the calculation with your own numbers: time three of last quarter's claims end to end — pulling the bill of lading, the signed delivery receipt, the cost documentation, and the photos into one place — and see where your write-off floor actually sits. Most teams find it is higher than the threshold written in their claims policy, which means they are declining claims they believe they are filing.
Break-even claim value
Everything above is an argument about the past. Everything below happens before you pay.
A claim is fought over evidence that stopped changing the moment the driver pulled away. You can argue it well or badly, but the facts were fixed at the dock, and the best outcome available is a fraction of a loss you have already taken.
An invoice is a different position entirely. The money is still in your account until AP releases it, the carrier still wants the lane at renewal, and nothing has to be recovered — it just has to not be paid. That is why the second half of this page is worth more than the first, and why it is usually the half nobody owns.
The eight freight invoice discrepancy types
Freight invoices are not wrong at random. The same eight things go wrong, in predictable proportions, and each one has a different answer.
Across most shipper portfolios, audit programs find billing errors on somewhere between 1% and 5% of invoices and recover 0.5% to 2% of audited freight spend. The spread is not noise, it is mode mix. Parcel and LTL sit at the top of that range because accessorials multiply and every shipment carries a dozen rateable attributes. Contracted truckload with a simple per-mile rate sits at the bottom. If a vendor quotes you a flat 5% recovery on a truckload-heavy book, ask them which of the eight lines below is producing it.
New since 28 May 2024
| Discrepancy | How it shows on the invoice | Typical size | Usually valid? | Root-cause fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reweigh | Carrier scale ticket weight exceeds the BOL weight; linehaul rerated | 5-20% of linehaul | Usually validif a certified scale ticket is attached | Weigh at origin and put the actual weight on the BOL |
| Reclassification (LTL) | NMFC class raised, e.g. 70 to 100, after a density check or dock inspection | 15-35% of linehaul | Sometimesdemand the inspection certificate with dimensions | Capture real pallet dimensions per SKU and re-verify after the density-based NMFC restructure phased in from mid-2025 |
| Unquoted accessorials | Liftgate, residential, limited access, inside delivery, redelivery, driver assist added at delivery | $25-$500 each | Usually validvalid, and almost always avoidable | Store delivery-site attributes on the customer record instead of discovering them at the dock |
| Duplicate billing | Same PRO or container billed twice, or billed by both the carrier and the broker | 100% of the duplicate | Never | Deduplicate on PRO, BOL, and container number at invoice ingest |
| Wrong fuel surcharge | FSC taken from the wrong DOE index week, or applied to accessorials as well as linehaul | 2-8% of the invoice | Neveronce you recompute it | Recompute FSC from the published index and the contract table on every invoice |
| Discount or tariff not applied | Base tariff billed with the negotiated discount missing, or the wrong tariff base used | 10-40% of linehaul | Never | Rate the shipment from the contract before payment, not after |
| Detention, demurrage, per diem | Per-container per-day charges past free time, frequently with no supporting timestamps | $50-$300 per container per day | Sometimesthe timestamps decide it | Keep a timestamped custody trail (gate in, gate out, appointment, release) per container |
| Parcel dimensional weight and surcharges | Billed weight above actual weight, plus additional handling, large package, and peak surcharges | 10-40% of the base rate | Usually validif the dimensions are right | Audit box dimensions in the shipping system: billed weight = L × W × H ÷ 139 for US domestic |
What disputing actually costs you
Nobody in this job files without thinking about the bid. A core carrier that gets short-paid on 40% of its invoices and hit with a claim on every damaged pallet will price that into your next renewal, and during peak it will remember who fought about $128.
The way out is not to dispute less, it is to dispute in a pattern rather than one invoice at a time. Bring one document to the quarterly review: variance by accessorial code, claims frequency and severity by lane, and the share of each carrier's invoices that needed correction. A carrier that sees its own error rate next to a competitor's fixes the error rate. A carrier that only ever sees individual disputes concludes you are difficult.
That same document belongs in the bid. Claims frequency per thousand shipments and invoice accuracy are scorecard lines, and they are worth more at renewal than they are as recoveries — a carrier whose damage rate is triple its peers' on the same lane is either handling your freight badly or telling you your packaging spec is wrong, and both are worth knowing before you award the lane.
Three lines worth bringing to a quarterly review
- Invoice accuracy: share of this carrier's invoices that needed correction, next to the portfolio average.
- Claims frequency and severity per thousand shipments, split by lane.
- Accessorial variance by code, so the recurring charges separate from the one-offs.
Worked example: auditing one LTL invoice and one fuel surcharge
Six pallets, 4,200 lb quoted, class 70, Chicago to Dallas. Here is the same shipment quoted and invoiced, line by line.
Quoted
$762.55
Invoiced
$1,183.67
$421.12
55.2% over quote
$198.12
Conditionally valid — demand the certificate
Reweigh and reclass ($159.00) plus the fuel that rides on it ($39.12). Valid only if the carrier produces a certified scale ticket and an inspection certificate with dimensions. If they can, this is a data problem at your origin.
$95.00
Valid, and a quoting failure
The liftgate is real. That delivery site has needed one on every delivery for two years and it has never once been on the original quote.
$128.00
Invalid — dispute it
The delivery address never changed. There was no reconsignment. Short-pay it with a reason code.
Only $128 of a $421 variance is a recovery. The other $293 is a process fix.
Now the fuel surcharge, on the truckload side
FSC per mile = (DOE weekly average diesel − contract peg) ÷ contracted MPG
- DOE weekly average for the applicable week
- $3.72 / gal
- Contract peg
- $1.25 / gal
- Contracted MPG
- 6.0
- (3.72 − 1.25) ÷ 6.0
- $0.4117 / mi
- Correct charge on an 890-mile lane
- $366.38
- Invoiced
- $412.37
- Variance — 12.6% over
- $45.99
Back-solving, that is the index from three weeks earlier, when the national average was $4.03. A single wrong index week. Forty-six dollars is not worth a phone call — but that lane pattern ran 1,340 loads last year.
$46 × 1,340 loads = $61,640
One carrier, one formula error, one year.
Freight audit findings are almost never large per invoice. They are large per pattern. The other half of the job lives in supply chain analytics: the same variance grouped by lane, carrier, accessorial code, and delivery site until the pattern is undeniable.
The fuel formula
Freight audit software and audit-and-pay providers: what they cost and when they pay off
Freight audit and pay (FAP) providers do four things: receive and normalize carrier invoices, rate each shipment against your contract, dispute the variances, and pay the carriers on your behalf. Freight audit software does the first two and hands you the third. The line between them is blurring, but the pricing models are distinct and worth understanding before you sit down with anyone.
Per-invoice fee
$0.35 – $3.00
Depends on volume, mode, and how much manual handling your invoice formats require. Predictable, and it aligns the provider with throughput rather than with findings.
Contingency
20% – 35%
Of what they recover. No recovery, no fee — appealing to CFOs and quietly misaligned: a contingency provider earns nothing from the process fix that stops the charge recurring.
Hybrid or flat monthly
Negotiated
Common at larger volumes, often with the payment function priced separately.
The build-versus-buy math
Take a shipper with $18M in annual freight spend across 42,000 invoices (60% truckload, 30% LTL, 10% parcel).
Every input below is an assumption, not a benchmark
Swap in your own before you show this to anyone. Assumed:
- error incidence — 3% of invoices
- average invalid amount — $150
- analyst — $85,000 fully loaded
- throughput — 60 invoices reviewed per day
- Invoices with an error — 42,000 × 3%
- 1,260
- Gross recovery — 1,260 × $150
- ~$189,000
- As a share of audited spend
- ~1%
- Contingency FAP fee at 28%
- ~$53,000
- Net recovery via contingency FAP
- ~$136,000
- FTEs to review all 42,000 — ÷ 15,000/yr
- ~2.8 FTE
- In-house manual review cost
- ~$238,000
A competent analyst re-rating from contract — not eyeballing totals — clears somewhere between 40 and 80 invoices a day depending on mode and how many accessorials each carries. Take 60, or about 15,000 a year at full review; substitute your own number, because this single input moves the conclusion more than anything else below. At 60 a day, in-house manual audit of the whole book costs roughly $238,000 to recover roughly $189,000. It loses money outright.
That is the real reason contingency FAP exists, and it is also the argument for freight audit software rather than headcount. Software does not find more errors than a good analyst. It changes which invoices a human ever touches. Rate every shipment from the contract automatically, flag only variances above a tolerance, and human review drops to the 3-8% of invoices that actually fail the check.
- Invoices needing human review at a 6% exception rate
- 2,520
- FTEs — 2,520 ÷ 15,000
- ~0.17 FTE
- Labour cost
- ~$14,000
Same ~$189,000 in findings, at roughly 6% of the labour cost. The economics of freight audit are not about the audit. They are about how many invoices a person has to look at.
Use the same formula rather than a rule of thumb. Available recovery is roughly 1% of audited spend; your cost is the labour to review whatever share of invoices a human has to open. At $2M in spend that is about $20,000 available against roughly a third of an FTE at full manual review — a spreadsheet pass on your top three carriers' accessorial lines is the right answer and a formal program is not. At $18M it is about $189,000 available against 2.8 FTE, and manual review loses money outright. The crossover is not a revenue number, it is the point where invoice count times review minutes exceeds the recovery. Audit one quarter by hand, measure your own error incidence and your own review time, then decide.
| Approach | Annual cost on 42,000 invoices | Finds | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual in-house review | ~$238,000 (2.8 FTE) | ~$189,000 | Nobody, at this volume |
| Contingency FAP at 28% | ~$53,000 (fee only) | ~$189,000 gross, ~$136,000 net | Teams with no systems budget and no appetite for process change |
| Per-invoice FAP at $1.20 | ~$50,000 | ~$189,000 gross, ~$139,000 net | Stable, high-volume invoice flows |
| Automated pre-payment rating + exception review | ~$14,000 labour + software | ~$189,000 gross, plus the recurring fixes | Shippers who want the charge to stop, not just the refund |
Related reading: how to reduce supply chain costs.
The variable that matters
A container can owe you a refund and a claim at the same time
A box that sat too long at the terminal produces a per diem invoice somebody should be auditing and, if what is inside it arrived wet or crushed, a cargo claim running on a one-year clock under COGSA. Same shipment, two disciplines, two teams, and usually two separate decisions that it is not worth the hours.
Both are settled by the same handful of records: the gate timestamps, the release, the interchange receipt, the annotated delivery receipt. Pull them on the day and you have a case either way. Go looking a month later and the terminal screen you needed has already refreshed.
Stop recovering. Start preventing.
Run the eight types through one filter: is this the carrier's mistake, or mine coming back as a charge?
3 are the carrier's
Duplicate billing
Recover
Missing contracted discount
Recover
Wrong fuel index
Recover
5 are yours, returning as a charge
Reweigh
your origin weight was wrong
Reclass
your dimensions or NMFC assignment were wrong
Liftgate
the delivery site's attributes were not on the order
Redelivery
nobody checked receiving hours before dispatch
Detention
the appointment and the dock did not line up
You can recover against three of eight forever and the other five will bill you again next month. And the pattern is always concentrated. In most portfolios, a handful of delivery sites generate the majority of accessorial spend, a handful of SKUs generate the reclasses, and one or two customers generate the redeliveries. Group your accessorial charges by delivery location for one quarter and the list of things to fix writes itself.
On the claims side, prevention looks different but works the same way. Claims cluster by lane, by carrier, by packaging spec, and by receiving site. If one origin generates four times the damage claims of comparable sites, the problem is a pallet pattern or a stretch-wrap spec, not bad luck on the highway. If one carrier's claims all involve concealed damage found late, the problem is your receiving process at that destination. Those are procurement inputs, not just recoveries — carry them into the bid.
What both sides need is the same thing: shipment-level records that survive long enough to be grouped and counted. Which is where most teams hit the wall, because the order lives in the ERP, the shipment lives in the TMS, the receipt lives in the WMS, the POD lives in a carrier portal or a scanned PDF, and the invoice lives in AP. Nobody can group by delivery site across five systems in a day.
Recovery vs. root cause
Where Orkestra fits, and where it does not
Everything above turns on one thing: whether the record exists in one place at the moment you need it. A claim survives because the annotated POD, the photos, the BOL, and the cost documentation are attached to the shipment rather than scattered across a carrier portal, a shared drive, and someone's phone. A detention charge gets reversed because you can produce gate-in, appointment, and release timestamps. An accessorial pattern gets fixed because you can group a quarter of charges by delivery site without a five-system reconciliation project.
Orkestra is the layer that holds that record. It sits over the ERP, TMS, and WMS you already run, so orders, shipments, receipts, documents, and exceptions live against one shipment identity instead of five. Document management keeps the bill of lading, delivery receipt, commercial invoice, packing list, and inspection photos attached to the shipment they belong to — which is the difference between assembling a claim file and reconstructing one.
We are not going to put a number on what that saves you, because it depends entirely on where your documents live today. Run the break-even formula from earlier in this guide against your own assembly time, before and after. If your write-off floor does not move, this is not your bottleneck and you should spend the money elsewhere.
The Exception Monitoring Agent will not tell you a pallet arrived crushed — that starts with a person at a dock, and no software changes it. What it catches is the other half: the late and short deliveries, and the shipments where a clean proof of delivery never came back at all. A missing POD is a claim you cannot file and a delivery you cannot prove, and it stays invisible until someone goes looking. Surfacing it in week one instead of at month-end is the difference between a live claim and an expired one.
Analytics runs on normalized shipment and cost data, so accessorial variance grouped by lane, carrier, and delivery site takes an afternoon rather than a quarter.
83%
One data point on the document side, stated narrowly: after consolidating carrier data into one platform, the Defense Logistics Agency measured an 83% increase in proof-of-delivery visibility in a four-week deployment. That is a POD coverage number, not a claims recovery number — we have not measured what it did to their claims. We include it because POD coverage is the input the claims process is starved of, and it is a number you can reproduce on your own data in a pilot.
Proof-of-delivery visibility, Defense Logistics Agency. A POD coverage measurement, not a claims-recovery measurement.
What Orkestra is not
Orkestra is not a freight audit and pay bureau. It does not receive your carrier invoices for payment, cut carrier payments, file claims on your behalf, negotiate with carriers, or recover funds for a contingency fee. If you need someone to audit, dispute, and pay, hire an FAP provider or staff an AP analyst — and if you already have one, keep them. Orkestra does two things next to that: surfaces the discrepancy while there is still time to act on it, and holds the document trail that decides whether the dispute survives.
Freight claims and freight audit questions, answered
A major grocery supplier reached carton-level traceability, took 15% out of freight and trucking, and retired thousands of manual hours a year.
“First-ever carton-level traceability across the entire supply chain, eliminating thousands of hours of manual work.”— Major Grocery Supplier, Retail & CPG
