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An extra freight charge: what was agreed?
Short answer
Automated freight cost reconciliation sets every charge on a carrier's invoice against the right transport order and its terms. The logistics employee sees the difference next to the passage of the order and has a basis for a question to the carrier. The judgement and the decision stay with a person. At Syntalith the system costs from €3,000 net and at 1,000 lines a month pays back in 2.0 months.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net for the automation of one process, build paid once
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 2–6 weeks
- free prototype on your cases
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
Transport and AI: statistics 2026
2.0 mo.
payback of a €3,000 check at 1,000 carrier invoice lines a month: €1,745 of work today, €269 with the system. Scenario.
11.2%
According to Eurostat (2025), 11.2% of EU transportation and storage enterprises with at least 10 employees used AI.
Source: Eurostat, artificial intelligence by NACE activity (2025) ↗
50%
According to the European Commission (2026), half of EU SMEs and mid-caps name high investment costs as a barrier to AI.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
90%
According to the European Commission (2026), 90% of companies using AI say that people take the decisions, and 2% of decisions are fully automated.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
1,886 bn
According to Eurostat (2026), EU road freight transport reached 1,886.0 billion tonne-kilometres in 2025.
Source: Eurostat, road freight transport by journey characteristics (2026) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
Unloading with a tail lift was already in the order
The transport order clearly includes unloading with a tail lift as part of the service. On the invoice for that transport, the carrier lists it as an extra charge. The person checking the documents has to find the right order before asking about the charge.
A good comparison shows, next to the line, the transport number and the passage of the order that includes unloading in the price. The logistics employee opens both documents, checks that they concern the same service and asks the carrier where the separate charge comes from. They record the answer with the case, so the billing team sees what was agreed.
Link the charge to the right transport
- 01LineA charge from an invoice that covers many transports.
- 02TransportA reference that leads to a specific order, besides the carrier and the month.
- 03Order versionThe version accepted for delivery, if the client changed the order.
- 04ComparisonThe service described on the invoice next to the terms of the order.
- 05ClarificationA question to the carrier and the answer recorded with the case.
If the agreed order is missing, it has to be found before the system compares anything. The workflow for checking changes to orders is described on the AI in transport and logistics page.
What freight invoice checks cost and when they pay back
- Today
- 1,000 lines × 3 min = 50 h (€1,745)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 15% of the time
- €262
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €7.11
- Cost of one case
- €1.75 today, €0.27 with the system
- Saving
- €1,476 a month
Payback of €3,000
2.0 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 2,500 input tokens and 300 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The count includes only the checking time. Every undue surcharge cleared up before payment is an extra benefit we leave out, because its size depends on the carriers.
First check the transport management system
Transport management systems can reconcile expected freight costs with carrier invoices, as for example Microsoft's documentation on freight reconciliation describes.
Charges and services are in order in the transport system
configuration or integration
€0
A few transports a month
a spreadsheet and a manual comparison
€0
Different invoice layouts and service descriptions from many carriers
reading with AI and comparison with the order
from €3,000
The difference needs a search through emails about the delivery
an agent that investigates discrepancies
from €3,000
A language model is not needed to match clearly described lines. If the system already confuses the fields of a document while reading it, the reading has to be fixed first. The wider search is described in the article on investigating invoice discrepancies.
How to measure the effect
Measure the number of surcharges challenged before payment, the time from receiving the invoice to the clarification and the number of cases in which the carrier corrected the invoice. Also record false alarms: lines the system flagged that matched the order. Too many false alarms will make the logistics team stop reading the flags.
After a few months the data shows which carriers most often add services outside the order. That is material for the next rate negotiations, with no automatic penalties.
A carrier who does not answer a question about a surcharge is a matter for the person who manages the relationship with them. The system records the question and the reply deadline, and the decision on payment stays with a person.
The first scope
- One surcharge for which an employee had to look up earlier agreements
- Where they found the order and whom they passed the question to
- A chosen group of carriers or one invoice workflow
- The format of invoices and orders, with no confidential data
To start, choose the carriers with the most invoices. That is where looking up orders by hand takes the most time and where you will see fastest whether the comparison works. Once the surcharges are cleared up, the data can feed a report of vehicle and order costs, which needs its own cost split rules.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: transport and logistics
We run the same count for your carriers in the free analysis.
€1,745
a month for retyping 1,000 CMR and POD documents
Payback: 2 mo.
3 minutes per document and checking in 15% of the old time are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. We use it here in place of a transport sector wage. Model cost: 0.007617 USD per reading, measured in our system, which is about €0.0069 per document, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
