How Mid-Size Manufacturers Are Recovering Tens of Thousands in Freight Overcharges

Midwest Auto Components ships brake assemblies, suspension parts, and specialty fasteners to 60+ OEM customers across the Midwest and Southeast. Their shipping controller was manually spot-checking roughly 5% of invoices each month — a process that took 12 hours of staff time and still missed the majority of billing errors. After a consultant suggested they were likely overpaying, they enrolled in the FreightDetective.ai free 3-year historical audit.

FreightDetective ingested 36 months of FedEx and UPS invoices — over 14,000 individual shipments — and ran each one through our 12-point audit engine. The engine cross-referenced contracted rates, applied weight-break rules, flagged dimensional weight discrepancies, and checked for duplicate billing. The entire analysis was completed within 72 hours of upload.

Great Lakes ships temperature-sensitive food products and dry goods to grocery chains, restaurants, and institutional buyers across five states. Their shipping volume fluctuates significantly by season, and their XPO contract included complex tiered pricing that their small logistics team struggled to verify manually. The company had never conducted a formal freight audit and suspected they were leaving money on the table.

After uploading 3 years of FedEx and XPO invoices, FreightDetective's audit engine identified a pattern of systematic overcharges tied to XPO's fuel surcharge calculations and FedEx's accessorial fee structure. The platform generated carrier-specific dispute packages with supporting documentation drawn directly from the original invoice data.

Precision Industrial ships MRO supplies, cutting tools, and industrial equipment to manufacturing plants across the country. With three carriers and a high volume of small-package and LTL shipments, their shipping manager was overwhelmed trying to reconcile invoices against purchase orders. The company had attempted a manual audit two years prior but abandoned it after two weeks due to the complexity.

FreightDetective processed invoices from all three carriers simultaneously, normalizing the data into a unified audit format. The platform's audit engine applied carrier-specific rule sets for UPS, FedEx, and Old Dominion, identifying errors that would have been nearly impossible to catch through manual comparison across different invoice formats.