Three-Way Document Matching and Shipment Reconciliation

Comparing the purchase order, the supplier invoice and the goods receipt before approving payment: was it ordered, was it received, and is the price as agreed. Any of the three failing should stop payment. In international trade it is worth extending to the transport document, which records what the carrier actually received.

Purchase orders, commercial invoices, packing lists, goods receipts, bills of lading, sea waybills, air waybills, booking confirmations, arrival notices and freight invoices. Any documents grouped as one shipment are compared; the more of the set present, the more comparisons are possible.

By shared references — B/L number, booking number, invoice number, purchase order, container numbers — found in the extracted data. Documents forwarded together by email are grouped automatically, and grouping can be adjusted manually where a reference is missing or a shipment spans several deliveries.

No. Each document keeps its own extracted values, and a discrepancy records which document stated what. Nothing is merged into a single record, because knowing which party to raise a difference with — and being able to show the evidence — depends on the provenance being preserved.

By operational impact rather than by document order: what blocks customs clearance first, then what blocks payment, then what affects delivery, then informational differences. A twenty-item list ordered by page position gets ignored; the same list ordered by consequence gets worked.

Small bands on weights and amounts, because printed totals routinely round differently from their components and flagging every rounding difference buries the real findings. Where a variance exceeds the band, both figures and the size of the gap are shown so the decision is made on the number rather than on a binary flag.

Yes. Line matching uses several signals — item code, description, quantity and price — rather than a single key, so a supplier's own part numbers can be matched against your item lines. Where the correspondence is genuinely ambiguous, the lines are reported unmatched for a human to resolve rather than paired on a weak similarity.

The match reports as incomplete rather than passing. This is deliberate: a three-way match that approves because the goods receipt was never uploaded is not a control at all. The missing evidence role is named so it is clear what is needed to complete the check.

Where the credit's requirements are recorded, the documents can be compared against them — description wording, amount and currency, latest shipment date, consignee, required documents. Bank examination is literal, so catching a wording difference before presentation is materially cheaper than a discrepancy after.

Yes, as a PDF discrepancy report showing each finding with both source values and the documents they came from. That report is what makes the conversation with a supplier, forwarder or carrier evidence-based rather than an assertion, and it is worth attaching to the shipment file whether or not the finding is disputed.

It runs as soon as the documents in a group have been extracted, so the discrepancy list is available within the same session rather than as a separate batch process. Adding a further document to an existing shipment re-runs the comparison against the whole set.

Yes, but the partial nature has to be visible. Where an invoice covers a full order and the packing list covers one of three shipments, the quantity difference is a legitimate one — recording the reason against the finding stops it being re-investigated on every subsequent document that arrives.

Available comparisons include document references, parties, ports, containers, quantities, weights, currencies, amounts and shipment dates.

No. Matching reports agreements and differences while preserving the values extracted from each source document.

Yes. Purchase orders, commercial invoices and goods receipts can be linked and checked at header and line level when the necessary references are present.