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.
We set out the full evidence base — what the published data actually supports, which figures we reject and why pre-payment checking is a different process from post-audit recovery — in our white paper: Approved against a threshold, not against the contract.
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?
The three questions finance and IT ask about a tool that sits next to the payment run, answered before you have to ask them.
It raises an exception on a line with the contract clause it failed against. A person decides what happens next, and that decision is recorded with a reason. Nothing is paid, blocked or disputed automatically, and the rest of the invoice keeps its payment date.
Every comparison is stored with the contract version in force on the shipment date, who reviewed it and when. Immutable, attributable and exportable — the same governance the quality side of the platform runs under, because it is the same platform — see Part 11 vs Annex 11 side by side.
Language models are used only to read rate cards, agreements and amendments into structured terms, and you confirm what was extracted before anything is checked against it. The comparison itself is deterministic: line against clause, version against date.
Every figure on this page with its primary source checked, why threshold approval is rational and structurally wrong, and what changes when the check happens before the payment run instead of after. 3 200 words, written for people who will look at the footnotes.
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.
