Freight Invoice OCR and Charge-Line Extraction

Invoice header details, all shipment references including B/L, booking and container numbers, the route and service, the rated basis such as chargeable weight or revenue tons, and every charge line separately with its description, code, basis, rate, quantity, currency and amount — plus tax lines and totals.

Because a total cannot be audited. Freight billing errors are rarely fabrications; they are individually plausible charges that were never agreed — a fee billed twice under two names, a surcharge at the wrong percentage, an accessorial for a service not rendered. None of those are visible without line-level detail.

Duplicate descriptions within one invoice are flagged directly. Duplicates across invoices — the same service billed on both the origin and destination invoice — are found by grouping the invoices to the same shipment, which is where that pattern actually lives.

Yes, in deterministic code. Each line is recomputed as rate × quantity, the lines are summed against the printed subtotal, and subtotal plus tax is compared with the invoice total. Currency consistency is checked across all of them, since a single line in a different currency silently distorts the total.

It extracts the rate, basis and quantity as separate fields so the comparison against your quotation or service contract is direct rather than requiring the figures to be dug out of a PDF. The contract itself remains the authority — the parser presents the evidence in a form you can check against it.

Yes, as charge lines with their basis and day counts where those are printed. Auditing them properly requires the tariff, the gate records and the day-count convention, which is what the demurrage calculator is for. Extraction gives you the billed figures in a form you can check that calculation against.

Yes, by B/L number, booking reference and container numbers, with container check digits recomputed. Where the invoice references a shipment already in the workspace it is linked automatically, and rated weights and volumes are compared against the transport document and packing list.

Currency is captured per line as well as per invoice, and inconsistency is flagged. Multi-currency freight invoices are common where local charges are billed in local currency against a USD ocean rate, and any conversion rate printed on the invoice is captured as a field rather than applied silently.

Yes. Forwarder invoices are typically the more complex of the two, bundling carrier charges with the forwarder's own services and disbursements. The same line-level model applies, and disbursement lines that pass through a third party's charge are captured with whatever supporting reference is printed.

Inside whatever dispute window applies, which is often short and sometimes contractual. In the United States, demurrage and detention billing rules give the billed party a defined period to seek mitigation. The practical discipline is to audit on receipt rather than at payment, because a dispute raised after the window closes is usually payable regardless of merit.

Yes. Export produces the charge lines as rows in Excel or CSV, and structured JSON where the array needs to survive into a downstream system. Charge-line data across many invoices is what makes lane-level cost analysis possible at all, which is a second use for the same extraction.

No, and it should not. It tells you what was billed, on what basis, at what rate, and which document — if any — supports it. Whether a charge is authorised is a question about your contract and what actually happened, and that judgement stays with you. The parser removes the data-gathering, not the decision.

No. Base freight, fuel, terminal and accessorial charges remain separate rows for auditability.

Yes. Use the LCL W/M calculator with CBM and gross weight from the shipment, then compare the estimate with the parsed charge lines.