Automatically Reconciling Transportation Billing with Operational Data

The industry and its realities

The company rents and distributes heavy equipment to construction sites across multiple branches, which means a steady volume of deliveries handled by third-party carriers. Each delivery generates a separate transportation invoice, with charges that vary by distance, on-site wait time, and carrier-specific rate agreements.

Tracking these operations runs through a transportation management system (TMS) that already holds the real data for every load, but nothing automatically linked that data to the invoices received from carriers.

The client’s intent and need

The accounts payable team validated transportation invoices manually, without being able to systematically cross-check them against TMS data. This created several blind spots: billed amounts that didn't always match actual loads, wait-time charges added without clear justification, and invoices that didn't explicitly reference the associated purchase order or load number.

The stated need was simple to articulate, more complex to deliver: validate every transportation invoice against real operational data, before payment, without adding manual workload to the team.

How Nord Numérique addressed the need

Nord Numérique took ownership of designing and delivering a dedicated software solution (SaaS) connected to the existing TMS, rather than a simple process recommendation. The goal: for invoice-to-operation reconciliation to happen automatically, with only genuine exceptions escalated to a person for review.

The steps taken to define the solution

• Scoping workshop with the accounts payable team to map recurring discrepancies (amounts, wait times, missing references).
• Mapping the current process (AS-IS) and defining the target process (TO-BE), including acceptable tolerance thresholds for automatic validation.
• Defining a reconciliation schema based on common keys (load number, purchase order, carrier, contracted rate).

Implementing the solution

The delivered solution extracts data from each incoming invoice, cross-checks it against the TMS data for the corresponding load, and automatically applies validation when the discrepancy stays under the agreed tolerance threshold. Invoices outside tolerance (amount discrepancy, undocumented wait time, missing load reference) are automatically routed to an exceptions queue rather than rejected or paid blindly.

A dashboard provides visibility by carrier and by cost center — previously impossible to obtain reliably from invoices alone.

Challenges encountered

The main challenge was the lack of a standard format across carriers: every invoice arrived in a different structure, which made reliable data extraction more complex than expected. The second challenge was defining tolerance thresholds that genuinely reduced the volume of manual exceptions without letting significant discrepancies slip through — a balance fine-tuned iteratively with the finance team after go-live.

Technical, organizational, and legal impacts

The delivered solution and its added value

The delivered solution includes automated invoice-to-TMS reconciliation, a structured exceptions queue, and a dashboard tracking transportation costs by carrier and cost center — documented as a complete SaaS delivery, covering functional and security aspects along with measured added value.

Measuring client satisfaction

The measured reduction in unjustified discrepancies allowed the finance team to tighten control over transportation costs without increasing their workload: the volume of manual checks decreased in favor of focused handling of cases that genuinely warrant it.