The Problem
The company ran freight audit across a dual-vendor model: Cass Information Systems handled pre-audit and payment, while ConData handled a supplementary post-audit layer. The division of responsibility created a structural data blindspot — two systems, two sets of carrier integrations, two exception workflows that did not share data. Reconciling what Cass had audited against what ConData had flagged required manual work that nobody had bandwidth to do systematically. The gaps in one system’s coverage were invisible to the other.
Cass’s inability to configure clean rate structures for 139 logistics providers was the audit system’s central failure. Invoices with accessorial charges — a large share of every billing cycle in a network of this complexity — required manual audit by Cass and secondary review by the logistics team because the system could not apply the correct rate logic automatically. 50% of invoices required this manual exception management cycle. The OTM TMS provided rate data, but no integration existed between Jaggaer (procurement), OTM (execution), and Cass (audit) — so rate discrepancies occurred because Cass was often running against stale or misconfigured rate records. Shipments with no rate records in the audit system passed through without validation.
Accruals ran against planned costs only. OTM captured linehaul and fuel but not accessorials. The finance team’s view of committed freight spend was systematically incomplete — every close cycle required reconciliation adjustments that consumed additional staff time and produced estimates rather than audited actuals.
What Freehand Did
Freehand replaced both Cass and ConData in a single platform deployment beginning June 2025, consolidating all 139 carriers across TL, LTL, Rail, Ocean, Air, Parcel, and Warehousing modes into one unified audit, exception, and payment workflow. The OTM integration was rebuilt cleanly: Freehand connects directly to OTM for shipment data and rate structures, Jaggaer for procurement master data, and Breakthrough Fuel for the live fuel index — all connected through the Context Graph, which maintains a real-time map of every contracted rate, shipment record, and billing event across the network.
The Audit Agent runs a multi-way match on every invoice: base freight against the contracted OTM rate, accessorial charges against the entitlement schedule for each carrier, and the billed shipment against the executed shipment. The rate discrepancies that had accumulated because Cass lacked access to current OTM rates are eliminated at the architecture level — the audit always runs against the live rate, not a stale export. The 50% of invoices that previously required manual exception management now process straight through to approval at 93% first-time match rate. The 7% that route to exceptions arrive at the Collaboration Agent with the discrepancy classified, the evidence assembled, and the carrier communication drafted.
The accrual gap is closed. The GL Coding Agent captures all cost components — linehaul, fuel, and accessorials — at the transaction level, producing real-time accruals that update before invoices arrive rather than after. The finance team closes on audited actuals rather than planned-cost estimates. Processing 350,000-plus invoices annually across all modes with 100% automated audit coverage, Freehand replaced both vendors and eliminated the dual-provider dependency that had fragmented the company’s freight finance function for years.
