How Shipsy digitizes rate cards and runs continuous audits against them

Shipsy turns carrier rate cards — usually trapped in PDFs, Excel tabs, and scattered email addenda — into structured, queryable pricing objects that drive allocation, invoicing, and audit in real time. Once digitized, every shipment is priced against the correct rate card automatically, and every invoice is audited against it line by line by Nexa, Shipsy’s settlement agent.

Why we built this

Enterprise shippers run 20-500 carrier contracts across lanes, modes, service levels, and regions. Each contract is a multi-dimensional pricing schedule with base rates, weight breaks, fuel-surcharge formulas, accessorial schedules, effective-date revisions, volume-commitment riders, and dispute-settlement terms. Most shippers keep this in a shared drive of Excel files that only two people understand, and the prices applied to actual shipments are best-effort approximations.

The cost is real: a global pharma CDMO handling multi-country clinical supply and a major Middle East 3PL and contract logistics provider both flagged “we don’t actually know what our contracts say” as a top-five operational risk. Shipsy solves it by treating rate cards as structured data, not documents.

How it works

Ingestion pipeline. Shipsy accepts rate cards in any format — PDF, Excel, Word, email body, carrier portal export. The ingestion tool extracts the structured schedule: origin/destination granularity (country, region, zone, zip, city-pair), weight/volume breakpoints, rate per break, surcharge formulas (static %, floating fuel index, dynamic), accessorial table (detention, demurrage, residential, liftgate, redelivery, etc.), effective date, expiry date, and any rider clauses (volume rebates, minimum commitments, dispute windows).

An AI extraction layer handles the long-tail of non-standard formats. Human review confirms edge cases before the rate card is activated. Typical onboarding for a 50-carrier portfolio is 4-8 weeks.

Structured rate object. Every activated rate card becomes a queryable object: given a shipment (lane, weight, service level, pickup date), the system returns the expected cost with full traceability to the rate-card clause. No guesswork, no shared-drive hunting.

Versioning + effective dates. Rate cards change — quarterly price reviews, fuel-index ticks, annual renegotiations. Shipsy stores every version with effective dates. A shipment dated 15 March prices against the March version even if you’re auditing it in June. Version history is auditable.

Allocation integration. Astra, Shipsy’s planning agent, consumes rate cards live during carrier allocation decisions. When a shipment enters the booking queue, Astra reads all carriers eligible for that lane/service, pulls current rate-card pricing for each, combines with the performance scorecard (see carrier performance scorecarding), and picks the carrier that optimizes cost + performance. No pricing-lookup tab, no manual quote request.

Continuous invoice audit. When invoices arrive, Nexa compares each line to the rate card: - Base-rate check — invoiced rate matches contracted rate for that lane/weight/service. - Surcharge formula check — fuel surcharge calculated correctly against the agreed index for the invoice week. - Accessorial schedule check — any billed accessorials match the schedule (rate, minimum, applicability rules). - Weight/dim check — billable weight matches the execution record (actual weight captured at hub, not just carrier-reported).

Any mismatch is classified and routed — matched lines to AP for payment, disputes to Vera, Shipsy’s dispute-resolution agent. See invoice reconciliation automation for the full audit loop.

Rate-card drift detection. Over time, carriers sometimes invoice at slightly different rates than the signed card — quiet drift from accessorial-rule reinterpretation, rounding habits, or portal errors. Nexa tracks rate drift per carrier per lane and flags patterns to procurement before they add up to material cost.

Bid event integration. When procurement runs an RFQ or bid event for a new lane, the rate-card framework becomes the template: bidders submit into the same structured schema, evaluations compare apples-to-apples, and winning carriers’ rates are already machine-readable on contract-award day. No re-digitization round two.

Early results

Shippers running full rate-card digitization typically recover 1-3% of total freight spend in the first 12 months — purely from catching rate-card deviations that would otherwise be paid silently. Beyond that, allocation quality improves because Astra makes cost-aware decisions instead of performance-only or contract-minimum decisions, and bid-event cycle time falls by 30-50% because the comparison layer is already structured. A global parcel leader spanning 65+ countries uses the digitized rate-card stack to manage subcontractor pricing across dozens of regional last-mile networks.

What’s next

Next release extends to index-linked dynamic pricing: rate cards that auto-adjust against fuel indices, currency fluctuations, or volume commitments — with Astra pulling the adjusted rate into allocation decisions in real time, so shippers always see true current cost.