Four invoices, reconciled.

The Friday invoice pile

Forty vendor invoices this week — ocean freight, THC, D&D, trucking — each needing a match against a job before month-end.

The desk ingests each invoice in whatever format it arrived, finds its job file, and matches line by line against your buy rates and accruals. Clean invoices post; variances queue for a human with the reason named. The pile stops being a Friday and becomes an exception list.

The D&D invoice with a story

Fourteen days of detention billed on a box your tracking desk knows was stuck behind a customs exam — not your customer's delay.

Detention and demurrage are the most-disputed lines in freight, and FMC data shows roughly 22% of billed D&D is never collected — disputing works when you have evidence. The desk pulls the event history, checks free time and clock start, and drafts the dispute with the exam hold documented. Then it chases the credit note until it lands.

The cost that arrived after the invoice

Your customer was invoiced Tuesday. The carrier's amendment fee arrived Thursday. Nobody re-billed it — margin quietly gone.

This is the AP→AR leak: late costs landing after the customer invoice went out, absorbed as write-offs by default. The desk flags every cost that arrives post-invoicing and routes it for re-billing while the job is still warm. On forwarder margins, this single flag pays for desks.

The overseas agent's statement

Your Rotterdam partner's monthly SOA: 23 lines across 9 jobs, in euros, netting what you owe them against what they owe you.

Agent settlement is reconciliation's forwarder-specific wrinkle: statements, not invoices; netting, not payment; currencies, plural. The desk matches each SOA line to its job and accrual, computes the net position, and flags the three lines that don't belong — before the settlement wire, not after.