The reconciliation vocabulary, defined properly.

The classic AP control matches invoice against purchase order against goods receipt. Forwarding has no purchase order — so the match becomes invoice ↔ job-file buy rate or accrual ↔ shipment evidence. The job file is the contract; the tracking events and documents are the receipt. Any three-way-match pitch that assumes a PO exists was written for a different industry. The desk runs the forwarder version on every line of every vendor invoice, automatically.

The two numbers every job lives between: the buy rate is what you agreed to pay the carrier, co-loader, trucker or agent; the sell rate is what you invoice your customer. The spread between them is the margin — thin in forwarding, which is why an invoice drifting a few percent above the buy rate is not rounding noise but margin leaving the building. Buy rates originate in the quote and live on the job file, which is exactly what makes them matchable.

The gap between what a vendor invoiced and what the job file says was agreed: the quote said $1,240, the invoice says $1,310. The most common variance reason on a reconciliation desk, and the easiest to wave through when checking is manual — each instance is individually small and collectively a margin programme. The desk shows both numbers, the source of each, and the difference, before anyone pays it.

The cost booked against a job before the vendor invoice arrives, so the P&L doesn't pretend the shipment was free. Reconciliation's core verb is 'reconcile actuals against accruals': does the invoice match what was accrued? Practitioner wrinkles include multi-container accruals — one accrued cost split across boxes that get invoiced separately — and withheld invoices, accruals that sit open for weeks because the vendor hasn't billed yet. Accruals booked at quoted rather than actual rates keep the P&L quietly wrong until someone reconciles.

Job costing is the discipline of assigning every cost and revenue line to the shipment that caused it, so each job carries its own economics. WIP — work in progress — is the pile of open jobs whose costs are still arriving: a job departing in week one may not show its final P&L for six weeks. Job costing is only as good as the reconciliation feeding it; unmatched invoices and stale accruals turn every WIP report into a work of fiction with a currency column.

Profit and loss computed per job, not per month: the margin you quoted versus the margin you actually kept after every invoice landed. The honest version requires matched invoices, trued-up accruals, and late costs re-billed rather than absorbed — which is why most forwarders only see a true shipment-level P&L at month-end, weeks after the decisions it should have informed.

A payment made out — in forwarding, often specifically a payment made on the customer's behalf, such as customs duty or port charges, to be recovered on the customer invoice. Disbursements are where AP and AR touch: pay one and fail to re-bill it, and you have donated it. The broader AP-metrics sense ('duplicate or erroneous disbursements') simply means outgoing payments of any kind.

Catching the same charge billed twice — which in freight rarely means the same invoice arriving twice. Duplicates hide across documents and weeks: the THC on the carrier invoice and again on the co-loader's SOA, the D&D line billed by the carrier and passed through by the trucker. Header-level checks (same vendor, same amount, same invoice number) miss these; line-level matching against the job file catches twins wearing different clothes.

The vendor's formal reversal of a charge — the document that turns a won dispute into money. Credit-note chasing is the unglamorous follow-through: tracking each accepted dispute until the credit actually lands and is applied against the right job. A won dispute without a credit note is just a nice conversation; the desk chases, politely and repeatedly, until the ledger agrees.

The monthly statement from an overseas partner: dozens of lines across many jobs, in their currency, covering both what you owe them and what they owe you. It is a statement, not an invoice — so the reconciliation unit is the line, and every line must find its job and its accrual before the total means anything. The desk splits SOAs per job and HBL, matches each line, and flags the ones that don't belong.

Settling an agent statement by computing the net position — what you owe them minus what they owe you — rather than paying gross in both directions, usually across more than one currency. Netting is efficient and unforgiving: a single wrong line moves the net directly. Inter-agent settlement disputes are common enough that partner networks sell financial-protection programmes for exactly this scenario; reconciling before the settlement wire is considerably cheaper.

Charges for handling a container at the origin or destination terminal — among the most standard lines in ocean freight, and among the most frequently duplicated, because origin and destination THC can each be billed by more than one party in a co-loaded chain. A well-behaved charge with a persistent talent for appearing twice.

Demurrage is the container occupying the terminal past its free time; detention is holding the carrier's equipment outside the terminal too long. Together, the most-disputed lines in freight: the FMC found nine major carriers charged $15.4B in D&D between April 2020 and March 2025, and roughly 22% of the D&D billed in 2020–22 was never collected — disputing works. In the US, the FMC's 2024 billing rule choreographed the fight (invoice timing, mandatory fields, a 30-day dispute window), but its 'properly issued invoices' provision was set aside by a federal court in December 2025 — so dispute leverage now rests on evidence, not procedure: free time, clock start, and the event history behind the box.

Everything billed beyond the base freight: THC, documentation and amendment fees, fumigation, chassis, gate fees, D&D pass-throughs. Individually small, collectively where invoices go wrong — and because accessorials surface late in a shipment's life, they are the charges most likely to arrive after your customer invoice went out and be silently absorbed instead of re-billed.

Two bills of lading for one shipment: the Master B/L issued by the carrier to you, the House B/L issued by you to your customer. For a reconciliation desk, the pair is the AP/AR fence in document form — the MBL side is what you get billed (matched here), the HBL side is what you bill (receivables' territory). Multi-shipment invoices and SOAs are split per job and HBL before any line can be matched.

The shipper-side industry: firms like Cass, Trax and Intelligent Audit auditing transport invoices on behalf of cargo owners — which sometimes means auditing yours. FAP is not what this desk does, and a forwarder should never self-describe with it. Vendor invoice reconciliation is the same discipline pointed the other way: at what carriers, co-loaders and agents bill you. Your customers audit every invoice you send; FAP names who does it for them.

Reverse Charge Mechanism and Input Tax Credit — the two GST concepts that make Indian forwarder AP a compliance function. Ocean freight can be taxed at 5% without ITC or 18% with it; FOB imports carry a 5% IGST reverse charge on the importer (Notification 10/2017-IGST), while the Supreme Court struck down RCM on ocean freight in CIF imports (Mohit Minerals, 2022). Claiming input credit means capturing the GST lines, RCM flags and vendor GSTIN off every invoice — a tax-defective invoice costs you the credit on top of the charge.

UAE VAT zero-rates international transport and its connected services, with input VAT recoverable — but the domestic leg is only zero-rated when the same supplier provides the international leg (Art. 33(1)(d), as clarified in FTA guidance). The TRN is the supplier's Tax Registration Number, one of the fields a valid tax invoice must carry; the FTA expects tax-invoice validity and five-year retention. Invoice-data accuracy here is a compliance obligation wearing a bookkeeping costume.