To evaluate a freight audit provider, stop asking what it does and start asking what it will show you. Nine things: findings on your own invoices before you sign, a worked recomputation you can follow line by line, a price, its recovery rate rather than its findings total, a sample dispute packet, the contract term and tail, its data export and deletion commitment, who speaks to your carriers, and what happens to findings under $100. Every one of those is a document or a number, not an opinion.
Almost any provider can produce a reference call and a case study. Those tell you about a customer who was already happy. The list below tells you about the thing you are actually buying, and several items on it are structurally hard for a contingency-priced firm to satisfy, which we will say plainly and then explain why it is not automatically disqualifying.
1. Findings on your own invoices, before you sign anything
The only demo worth watching runs on your data. Send 40 to 60 recent bills with their rate confirmations and PODs and ask for a findings report. If that request triggers a scoping call, a discovery session and a mutual NDA before anyone reads an invoice, you have learned how the next three years will feel.
We wrote the full method in how to run a freight audit pilot without a sales cycle, including how to seed known errors into the sample so you can measure detection instead of taking it on faith.
What to look for in the report: net-new findings, not a restatement of exceptions your own AP team already flagged. Ask explicitly whether anything in the report was already on your radar.
2. The arithmetic, not the conclusion
A finding that says “fuel surcharge appears overstated” is unusable. You cannot send it to a carrier, and neither can the vendor.
A usable finding shows the recomputation:
- The index value used, the specific week, and the source series.
- The peg price and the scale step from the carrier’s own table.
- The mileage basis if it is a per-mile truckload surcharge.
- The billed figure, the recomputed figure, and the difference.
Fuel surcharge is the best test because it is pure computation with a public input. Ask a provider to walk one finding from the EIA weekly on-highway diesel price through the carrier’s table to the invoiced dollar. If nobody on the call can do it, the tool is producing flags rather than findings. The failure mode that produces most of these errors is the effective-week lag, covered in which DOE week applies to your fuel surcharge.
Do the same test on a detention line. The finding should name the free time trigger in the rate con, the timestamps on the POD (or their absence), and the recomputed hours.
3. A price
No vendor in this category publishes one. Cass’s freight audit and payment product page carries no pricing, no fee structure and no pricing model. A buyer’s guide from ShipperGuide correctly names the three models in use (per-invoice fixed fee, percentage of spend or savings, tiered subscription) and discloses no figures for any of them.
So the price will come from a conversation, and the thing to pin down is not the headline number but what it attaches to, starting with how much of the fee is the audit and how much is the payment half of a bundled service. On a contingency deal, ask in writing:
- Is the percentage applied to recoveries, to savings, or to spend under management?
- Gross or net of the provider’s own fees?
- Does a renegotiated rate count as a “saving”?
- Is there a monthly minimum? A minimum turns “no recovery, no fee” into a fixed cost in quiet months.
The published contingency ranges conflict badly. Senvo states that third-party firms commonly take 30 to 50 percent of recoveries, and works an example where 40 percent costs a 3 million euro shipper 72,000 euros; Senvo is a vendor positioned against contingency pricing. Darrigo Consulting puts net savings to the shipper, after provider fees, at 50 to 75 percent of total recovery, which implies a provider share of 25 to 50 percent. A materially lower range, roughly 6 to 12 percent, circulates in search results and we have not been able to trace it to a source we could verify, so we will not cite it as fact. We work all three models with numbers in what freight audit actually costs.
We publish our own prices on our pricing page, which is easy for us to say and is exactly the point: the price is a fact, and facts can be published.
4. The recovery rate, not the findings total
This is the question that separates a serious provider from a good report generator.
A finding is a hypothesis. A recovery is a carrier credit. The ratio between them is the single most important number in this purchase, and it is the number almost nobody volunteers.
Ask: of the exceptions you flagged for a customer like us last year, what percentage resulted in a credit or a short pay the carrier accepted? Then ask whether they report it, monthly, in the product.
If a provider cannot answer, it is not necessarily hiding anything. Many genuinely do not track outcomes, because the dispute is filed by the customer and the credit lands in the customer’s AP system. That is a real limitation and it is worth naming as one. But a provider that has never thought about the question is telling you which half of the job it considers its own.
5. A sample dispute packet
Ask to see what actually gets sent to a carrier. Not the dashboard. The packet.
There is a legal floor here worth knowing. Under 49 CFR 378.4, an overcharge claim must be accompanied by the freight bill, the rate, classification, weight or tariff authority relied on, and payment information. The regulation also says inadequate documentation alone cannot disqualify a claim, so this is a standard for being taken seriously rather than a hard admissibility test. Note that this applies to overcharge claims on bills you have already paid; a pre-payment dispute or short pay is a contractual matter governed by your carrier agreement and the carrier’s rules tariff, not by Part 378.
A good packet identifies the shipment, states the charge disputed and the amount, shows the recomputation, attaches the contradicting document, and cites the contract or tariff provision. If your provider’s output is a spreadsheet row and you are expected to build the rest, price that labor into the deal. The six documents that win a detention dispute are the bar we would hold anyone to, including ourselves.
6. The contract term, the notice window and the tail
Read these four clauses before anything else in the agreement.
| Clause | What to ask | Why it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Term and auto-renewal | How long, and how many days notice to exit | A 36-month term with a 90-day notice window is a different product from the same price month to month |
| Minimum commitment | Is there a floor regardless of findings | Converts contingency into a fixed fee |
| Tail on recoveries | Who gets paid on disputes filed before termination but paid after | Contingency contracts frequently claim a tail. Know how long it runs |
| Scope of qualifying recovery | Does it include findings your own team identified first | Ask for a carve-out for exceptions you flag first |
None of these are unreasonable clauses for a provider to want. They become expensive when nobody reads them until month 30.
7. Your data, on the way out
Ask three questions and get the answers in the contract.
What do you get back? Your invoices, the extracted line items, the exception history, the dispute outcomes, the carrier performance record. In what format, and how fast after termination.
What gets deleted, and when? These are financial documents with your carrier rates in them. A deletion commitment with a date is worth more than a security page.
Who else sees it? Aggregate benchmarking across a provider’s customer base is a legitimate and useful product. Your named lane rates appearing in someone else’s benchmark is not. Ask how aggregation is done and whether your carrier and lane detail is identifiable.
8. Who talks to your carriers
Some providers dispute in your name. Some dispute as you, from an address that looks like you. Some hand you a drafted dispute and you send it.
This is not a compliance question, it is a relationship question, and you pay the cost either way. A carrier that starts receiving machine-generated short pays from a third party will price that into your next bid, and the person explaining it at renewal will be you, not the vendor. Recovery has a relationship cost, and it is not always worth paying.
Ask for the escalation path too. What happens when the carrier denies? Does the provider work the denial, or does the finding just sit in a queue marked “disputed” forever?
9. What happens to the small stuff
Ask directly: what is the dollar threshold below which a finding is not reported, and can I change it?
A $42 residential surcharge on a commercial address is a real error. So is an $18 fuel surcharge computed on the wrong week. Individually they are noise. At a few hundred loads a month they are most of the money, and they are the errors that repeat forever because nobody ever pushes back on them.
Here is the structural point, offered without any sneering: a contingency provider has a rational reason to drop small findings. If the firm keeps 30 percent of a $42 recovery, it earns $12.60 for work that costs it more than that. This is not dishonesty, it is arithmetic, and it is baked into the pricing model rather than into anyone’s character. A per-invoice or flat-fee provider has no such incentive, because it is paid for the process rather than the outcome. That is the honest case for our own model, and its mirror image is the honest case against it: we get paid whether we find you anything or not.
The one-page evaluation table
| Show me | Good answer | Answer that should slow you down |
|---|---|---|
| Findings on my own 50 bills | Report in days, no contract | “Let’s schedule a discovery call first” |
| A worked fuel surcharge finding | Index, week, peg, scale step, difference | “Our engine flagged it” |
| Your price | A number, or a clear model with the basis defined | “It depends on your spend profile” |
| Recovery rate | A percentage, tracked in the product | “We report findings” |
| A dispute packet | Complete, sendable, cites the contradicting document | A spreadsheet row |
| Contract term and tail | Stated plainly, short notice window | Buried in an exhibit |
| Data export and deletion | Format, timeline, written commitment | “Contact support at that time” |
| Carrier contact | You send, or explicit written control | “We handle everything” without detail |
| Small-finding threshold | Configurable, disclosed | No answer, or “we focus on material items” |
If you are the shipper
Weight items 1, 2 and 9 highest. Your recurring exposure is the long tail of accessorials and fuel surcharge math, and the difference between providers shows up in whether those get reported at all. Also check the turnaround against your credit period: under 49 CFR 377.203 the standard credit period is 15 days from the day after presentation, extendable by published tariff to no more than 30 days, so a provider that returns findings in three weeks is finding errors on money you have already sent.
If you are the broker
Weight items 5 and 8 highest. You have a carrier relationship to protect on one side and a customer margin to defend on the other, and a provider that disputes aggressively in your name can cost you more in capacity than it recovers in credits. Test the tool against a consolidated invoice covering multiple loads, and against the core rate con versus carrier invoice mismatch workflow, before anything else.
Before you sign
Get these in writing: the sample findings on your own bills, the price and its basis, the term and the tail, the export and deletion commitment, the carrier contact rule, and the small-finding threshold. If a provider will give you all six, the rest of the diligence is easy. If it will not give you the first one, none of the others matter yet.
Sources
- Cass Information Systems, freight audit and payment (no published pricing, fee structure or pricing model)
- ShipperGuide, how to choose a freight audit provider (names the three pricing models, discloses no figures)
- Senvo, freight audit and payment (30 to 50 percent contingency on recoveries; vendor-authored and positioned against contingency pricing)
- Darrigo Consulting, shipping and freight audit guide (net savings of 50 to 75 percent of total recovery; consultant-authored)
- 49 CFR 378.4 (documentation that must accompany an overcharge claim)
- 49 CFR 377.203 (15-day credit period, extendable by published tariff to no more than 30 calendar days)
- EIA weekly on-highway diesel prices (the index series behind most fuel surcharge tables)