Lido extracts linehaul charges, fuel surcharges, accessorial fees, and service charges from carrier freight invoices, in any format, from any carrier, and compares each charge against your contracted rates, generating a variance report that shows exactly where you are being overcharged before payment is released.
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Freight audit is one of the highest-ROI document processing workflows in logistics. Industry estimates put carrier billing error rates at 5–15% of freight spend. For a shipper moving $2M in freight per year, that is $100K–$300K in overcharges, recoverable with a systematic audit. Manual audit is too slow to catch most errors before payment. Lido audits every invoice automatically.
Freight invoices from LTL and FTL carriers arrive as PDF attachments via email, as EDI 210 transactions from carrier EDI connections, or as downloaded PDFs from carrier billing portals. Lido processes all three input types in the same audit pipeline. PDF and EDI produce the same structured charge output for rate comparison.
From each invoice: PRO number or freight bill number, carrier SCAC code, shipment date, origin and destination zip codes, service level, linehaul charges, fuel surcharge percentage and amount, and each accessorial charge line by line, liftgate, residential delivery, inside delivery, redelivery, detention, notify, limited access, hazmat, over-dimension, and all others. Total freight charges and any discounts or credits are also extracted.
Each extracted charge is matched against your carrier contract rate table by SCAC, service level, lane, and weight break. Linehaul rates are checked against the applicable tariff or discount structure. Fuel surcharges are validated against the carrier's published FSC index for the shipment date. Accessorial fees are checked against contracted accessorial rates per charge type. Charges where the carrier billed rate exceeds the contracted rate are flagged as variances.
Accessorial charges that do not appear in your carrier contract, or that appear in the contract but were not authorized for the shipment, are flagged separately from rate variances. Common examples: residential delivery charged on a commercial address, liftgate charged when liftgate was not requested, detention charged beyond the contractual free time. Each unauthorized accessorial is flagged with the invoice line and the dispute basis.
The audit output is a variance report listing every flagged charge: invoice number, charge type, billed amount, contracted amount, variance amount, and dispute basis. The report is formatted for direct submission to the carrier's billing dispute process. Clean invoices, where all charges match contracted rates, are flagged for payment approval without manual review.
Upload a batch and get structured output in minutes.
Less-than-truckload freight bills from national and regional LTL carriers. Class-rated and FAK (freight all kinds) structures both extracted and audited.
Full truckload carrier invoices for dedicated and spot market loads. Linehaul, fuel, and accessorial charges extracted regardless of carrier invoice format.
Weekly parcel carrier billing statements covering hundreds or thousands of shipments. Per-shipment charge breakdowns extracted and audited for address correction, residential surcharge, and dimensional weight billing errors.
Container drayage invoices from port trucking companies. Per-diem charges, chassis fees, port congestion surcharges, and over-dimensional fees extracted and compared against contracted drayage rates.
Intermodal carrier invoices covering rail linehaul and dray components. Both rail rate and drayage rate components extracted and audited separately.
Forwarder invoices covering multiple services: ocean freight, origin charges, destination charges, customs fees, and handling. Each charge component extracted for comparison against forwarder rate confirmation.
A transportation manager receives 400 carrier freight invoices per month. Manual audit means reviewing every invoice line by line, linehaul rate, fuel surcharge percentage, each accessorial, and comparing against the contract. In practice, only invoices above a dollar threshold get reviewed. Smaller invoices, and the accessorial errors they carry, go straight to payment. At 5% error rate across $150K monthly freight spend, $7,500 per month in overcharges goes undetected. Over a year, that is $90,000 paid to carriers for charges that were wrong.
Lido audits every freight invoice automatically, the $185 LTL shipment gets the same rate check as the $12,000 FTL load. Linehaul rates, fuel surcharge tiers, and every accessorial line are compared against the contracted rate in the same processing run. Overcharges are surfaced in a dispute-ready report within minutes of invoice receipt, before the payment approval window closes.
| Feature | Lido | Manual audit |
|---|---|---|
| Extract all charge components from any carrier freight invoice format | ✓ | ✗ |
| Compare every charge against contracted rates per carrier and lane | ✓ | ✗ |
| Flag unauthorized accessorials and billing errors with dispute basis | ✓ | ✗ |
| Validate fuel surcharge against carrier's published FSC index | ✓ | ✗ |
| Produce dispute-ready variance report per carrier invoice | ✓ | ✗ |
| Review selected invoices by hand, miss overcharges on smaller shipments | ✓ | ✓ |
Audit every freight invoice against your contracted rates automatically. Dispute overcharges before you pay.
A consumer goods manufacturer ships $3M in freight per year across 6 carrier contracts. Manual audit covered only invoices above $500. Lido audits every invoice. In the first month, 47 rate variances and 23 unauthorized accessorials are identified across 380 invoices — $18,400 in credits recovered from carriers.
A 3PL ships freight for 25 clients under client-negotiated carrier contracts. Freight invoices are audited against each client's contracted rates before the 3PL passes freight costs through to the client. Overcharges are caught and credited before the client invoice is generated, not discovered after the client has already been billed.
A freight audit and payment company audits carrier invoices for 40 shipper clients representing $80M in annual freight spend. Lido extracts and audits carrier invoices in batch, producing per-client variance reports that the FAP team reviews and submits for carrier credit, handling 4x the invoice volume with the same audit team.
A retailer collects freight from suppliers under prepaid arrangements where suppliers bill back freight costs on the commercial invoice. Lido extracts the freight charges on each supplier invoice and compares against the carrier freight bill for the same shipment, catching cases where suppliers bill freight at list rates while paying carrier-discounted rates.
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