Freight and courier reconciliation

A South African business shipping through several courier and freight carriers, each with its own rate card, surcharge rules and invoice format. Finance runs on an ERP with reporting in spreadsheets.

Every carrier invoice had to be checked line by line against shipments and the agreed rates before it could be approved and posted. Surcharges, fuel adjustments and re-deliveries made the comparison slow, and the people doing it were the same people who closed the month.

Exceptions were handled by email. An invoice with a disputed line sat in an inbox until someone chased the carrier, and the ledger stayed open until it came back.

A High Risers engineer embedded with the finance team, sitting with the people who matched invoices and watching how a shipment record, a rate card and a carrier invoice actually came together, including what happened when they did not.

The map showed where the time went: not in the matching itself, but in the waiting around each exception, and in re-keying the outcome into the ledger once it was resolved.

• Reconciliation agent

  Reads each carrier invoice, matches every line to a shipment and to the agreed rate card, and produces a posting-ready reconciliation for the lines that agree.

  • Invoice to shipment matching
  • Rate card and surcharge checks
  • Posting-ready reconciliation output

• Exception agent

  Classifies the lines that do not agree, attaches the shipment record, the rate and the invoice line as evidence, and routes the exception to the right person in the tool they already use. People decide; the agent prepares.

  • Exception classification
  • Evidence pack per exception
  • Routing to the owner

Built on top of the existing ERP and reporting systems, with no migration and no new software for the finance team.

Each agent was proved on the team's own past invoices before it touched a live one, and ran alongside the team before it took over.

Lines that agree no longer wait for a person. The team's time goes to the exceptions, and each exception arrives with the evidence already assembled.

The reconciliation output is ready to post, so the close is no longer held open by carrier invoices.