The first step in the true audit of a freight bill is to compare the information on the bill against the bill of lading and delivery receipt.  This catches billing errors such as where the carrier billed for 3,000 pounds instead of 300, or the carrier billed at the wrong class, or the shipment should have been collect and billed to someone else.
Most of the other audit companies skip this step.

The most common audit of a freight bill is the rate audit.  In addition to the rate savings, this step can also provide long term savings by highlighting instances where your normal discounts and rate bases do not apply.  With this information you can ask for carriers to waive certain accesorial fees in the bid or correctly charge your customers more for their freight. 

Duplicate Bills / Corrected Invoices

Carriers will often bill two or more times over the life of one freight invoice.  A carrier can bill once when a shipment is picked up and again to add accessorial charges.  These often have slight changes in the invoice number and can look like different bills.  NCL is adept at flagging these so you only pay the correct amount of the invoice.

Paper Bill vs EDI

In order to do the best audit of the bill we need to compare the shipper information against the carrier information.  If the shipper can provide their information in electronic format then we can get the electronic invoice from the carrier and match it up.  If the shipper can not give us their information electronically then we audit the paper bills.  

Audit Statistics

We find that on average 44% of the audit savings comes from comparing the shipper info against the carrier info.  The remining 56% of the audit savings comes from catching duplicate bills.  We do NOT count past due bills in our savings.