Compare Freight Audit Options

There is no single best freight invoice audit tool. There is a best fit for your invoice volume, mode mix and data quality, and five criteria decide it.

Where freya by TetriXX AI fits. It verifies every invoice as it arrives, holds zero carrier APIs, lets you set what clears automatically and what always surfaces per charge category, provider, mode and country, isolates every client environment from every other, and is scoped to pay for itself out of the recovery it produces.

Four types of provider, and the type matters more than the logo.

1. Freight audit and payment (FAP) bureaus, audit plus paying your carriers, from funds you place with them. Cass Information Systems, Trax Technologies and CTSI-Global operate this model. Strong on payment operations; the audit is typically rules-based and sampled.
2. TMS-embedded audit modules, convenient, no new vendor, and limited to the rate cards the TMS holds in formats it understands.
3. 3PL-provided audit, your provider checking its own invoices. Free, and structurally conflicted.
4. AI-native audit and cost intelligence platforms, verify every invoice rather than a sample, and reuse the data for forecasting. freya by TetriXX AI is in this category.

Choose the type first, on the five criteria above. Then compare vendors inside it.

Freight audit verifies charges and tells you which to dispute. Freight audit and payment does that and then pays your carriers, from funds you place with the provider.

FAP consolidates payment operations, which is useful at hundreds of carrier relationships. It also means the party checking the invoice is the party paying it, and your working capital sits in a third party’s account. freya by TetriXX AI audits and does not pay.

Where payment is the gap, that is a conversation rather than a dead end. We will work with your bank, or whichever financial institution you already pay through, to connect verified charge data to the payment run instead of replacing it.

It is enough if all your rate cards live in the TMS, in structures it models correctly, and your providers invoice in formats it can parse. That is a narrow set of shippers.

Where TMS audit typically stops: surcharges outside the contracted rate structure, invoices from unintegrated providers, contract formulas the data model cannot express, and any three-way match needing shipment data the TMS does not hold. It also cannot check a charge against the market, only against the contract.

The structural limit sits underneath all of those. A large part of any freight bill is variable, moving with fuel, currency, capacity, accessorials and surcharges between one shipment and the next, and most TMS audit modules cannot update those variable costs automatically. They verify against a reference somebody has to maintain by hand, so the moving part of the bill is checked against a stale rate or not checked at all.

No. It is one of the few questions in this market with a one-word answer. A provider auditing the invoices it issued is being asked to find its own errors, and the conflict does not need bad faith to produce a weak result.

It is the separation-of-duties principle finance applies everywhere else: the party being paid does not verify the payment. Your provider’s own check is worth having as a first pass, and it cannot become the control, because a control has to sit outside the party being paid. Independent verification, with the findings shared openly with the provider, is what actually holds.

At low volume, yes, and many teams do. Excel stops working when three things become true at once: rate cards change faster than one person can maintain them, invoices need manual re-keying, and volume means only a sample gets checked.

The tell is the sample, not the spreadsheet. The hidden cost at that stage is around 6,000 person-hours a year spent producing partial coverage.

Because the two answer different questions. Sampling estimates an error rate; verifying every invoice finds the specific charges that were wrong, which is the only version you can dispute.

The gap is not proportional. A surcharge misapplied on 4% of shipments may never appear in a 5% sample, and if it appears once, it reads as an incident rather than a pattern. The errors that cost most are small, repeated and individually unremarkable.

Verifying everything also leaves behind something a sample cannot. Every invoice, every charge line, every shipment and its CO₂e figure is captured on one record, which is a complete and granular source of truth on what you spent, what you moved and what it emitted. Procurement, operations and finance then work from the same record rather than from three partial extracts.

Four differences, in order of impact. Coverage: every invoice verified as it arrives, rather than a sample audited in arrears. Direction: the same data forecasts cost pressure, fuel, capacity, surcharges and FX, before it reaches an invoice. Independence: no carrier integrations, so the advice has no conflict behind it. One ledger for cost and carbon: the CO₂e figure is produced by the same verification as the cost, which is why it reconciles to the invoice instead of arriving from a separate reporting exercise.

And a difference in purpose. A recovery programme has done its job when the cheque arrives. freya by TetriXX AI is built so the same error stops happening, and so that what is left behind is worth more than what was recovered.

“Verification is the foundation. Intelligence is the outcome. Independence is the promise.”

Arnaud Rastoul and Emilie Annweiler, Co-Founders, TetriXX AI (published 19 May 2026)

Yes. freya by TetriXX AI is built to be the audit layer, not an addition to one. The question worth spending time on is how the transition runs, not whether it happens.

Running both in parallel through the changeover is straightforward, and it is the cleanest comparison available: the same invoices, two systems, and a measurable difference in what each one catches. That parallel run is what justifies the switch internally, instead of asking anyone to take it on trust.

One arrangement does stay permanent, and it is not a half-measure. Where the incumbent pays your carriers, verification with freya and disbursement with the existing provider is a stable split rather than a transitional one.