T he freight bill audit and quality process, but it’s just a given,” says Craig Cameron, chief marketing of cer with A3 Freight Payment. Shippers now look for providers that offer quality audits and also help them operate more effectively. payment (FBAP) process has become analogous to printer paper. “It still has to be a Savvy organizations are using the information generated by the FBAP process to improve their nancial controls, support negotiations with transportation providers, and better understand the activities that are driving transportation costs, says Luther M. Brown, chief executive of cer with nVision Global. “Freight audit and payment is becoming less about simply processing what happened and more about using the information to understand why it happened, what it means to the business, and what should happen next,” he says. Automation has also become an expectation. Organizations look for providers that can offer technology solutions that reduce the need for manual interventions. As shippers look to boost ef ciency and fully connect the process, they’re also more interested in having their providers close the loop by making the actual payment, says Tony Urban, executive vice president and president of Transportation Information Services, a division of Cass Information Systems. By leveraging a payment processing service, shippers can pay one FBAP provider rather than multiple carriers. They also gain more reliable timing of carrier payments and increased invoicing fraud controls.
One reason that more is being asked of FBAP providers lies in the data and insight an audit process can uncover. “The freight audit offers a beautiful, data-rich goldmine,” says Hannah Testani, chief executive of cer with Intelligent Audit. Many shippers leverage multiple transportation, order, and warehouse management solutions. The FBAP process becomes “the melting pot in the middle,” Testani says. No matter the systems a shipper uses, nor the data format, the audit team will take the information and make it useful.
data developed during a freight audit more important, he says. Also coming into play is the increase in digital and country-speci c regulatory requirements. For example, starting in 2030, the European Union’s VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) initiative will progressively expand digital reporting and e-invoicing requirements, Brown says. For global organizations, the ability to receive, normalize, and govern transportation nancial information across different countries, currencies, tax structures, and invoice standards will become more important and complicated. Not surprisingly, requests for FBAP services that can handle international transactions and operations are increasing. Technology is another catalyst for change, says Scott Burglechner, senior vice president and head of freight payment product management with U.S. Bank. Demand is growing for APIs, cloud-based connectivity, advanced analytics, and AI-powered capabilities that can help organizations modernize legacy processes and reduce dependence on manual work ows, he says. In particular, arti cial intelligence (AI) has been capturing attention. Freight audit has traditionally depended on structured data, OCR, and signi cant manual intervention to capture and validate transportation information, Brown says. That’s changing as AI and intelligent document technologies are making it possible to work with information from a wider range of data sources,
ROUNDING UP DATA SOURCES
Freight audit data provides an independent record of all that’s occurring within a transportation
network, says Ron Dodig, senior vice president, sales and solutions, with CT Logistics. A transportation management system (TMS) may show what was planned, a carrier system what was billed, and an ERP what was paid. “The FBAP provider is in a unique position to connect and validate those records,” he says. When the information is properly captured, normalized, and analyzed, it can in uence decisions beyond accounts payable, including carrier negotiations, network design, and operational compliance. The broader business and geopolitical changes are also prompting organizations to demand more. “Tariffs, geopolitical uncertainty, changing sourcing patterns, carrier surcharges, and increasingly complex global transactions create more variables that need to be validated,” Dodig says. This combination makes the clean, normalized transportation
such as information that arrives as PDFs, emails, and other less- structured formats.
September 2026 • Inbound Logistics 49
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