THE CALCULATOR
What the invoices nobody audits cost per year.
Two leaks, priced separately: what vendors over-bill you — at an error rate you choose — and what processing each invoice by hand costs, per Ardent Partners’ delta. Every assumption is on the ticket. A third leak is deliberately left out; the last card explains why.
Overbilling recovery + processing delta. Excludes the AP→AR leak (costs arriving after your customer was invoiced) — that one depends on your billing cadence, and it’s usually not small.
The error band is real — and contested
Industry estimates put freight invoice error rates at 3–8% of invoices; some vendors claim 20% and more. One famous number you won’t find here: “80% of carrier invoices contain discrepancies.” We checked the article that stat is attributed to — the figure is not in it — so we refuse to use it. The slider defaults mid-band at 5%; set it to what your desk actually sees.
The processing delta is measured
Ardent Partners’ AP metrics put the all-in cost of processing one invoice at $12.88 for the average firm against $2.78 for best-in-class — with cycle times of 17.4 versus 3.1 days. The calculator counts only the per-invoice cost delta; the fourteen-day cycle gap is a separate tax, paid in late accruals and month-end guesswork.
What the calculator refuses to count
The AP→AR leak — vendor costs landing after your customer was already invoiced — is not in the total, because its size depends on your billing cadence, not on any benchmark we could defend. For scale: on forwarder net margins of roughly 3–4% (illustrative), a single uncaptured pass-through fee can erase a shipment’s entire profit.