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Rate Cards

Every line billed at the rate you agreed.

Rate card, schedule of rates, price schedule, tariff. Whatever you call it, few businesses check every invoice line against it.

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The Complexity

One line is correct only when all the terms are correct.

  • Multi-Factor Rates

    A base rate varies by location, grade, volume band, time of day, fuel index, or contract year, and some charges depend on combinations of those.

  • Published Tender Math

    City Councils spell the calculation out in their tender documents. A twenty-day plant hire is charged as two weekly rates plus six daily ones. Nobody is doing that math across thousands of lines.

  • Coefficient-Based Billing

    In staffing, the supplier's charge is the worker's pay plus an agreed percentage. The coefficient alone is not enough to verify the invoice; you also need the figure it should have been applied to.

  • Beyond Manual Checking

    Checking one line properly can take the contract, the pricing schedule, the purchase order, the invoice, and the breakdown behind it. A person cannot do that several thousand times a month.

Proof

Findings from customer data.

$4.5M

of spend over three months. Errors worth 1.7% of spend.

unclaimed rebates
$3M
Payment terms misaligned
$182K lost following merger
Invoice Errors
~6% of invoices were wrong
Error Rate
1.7% unconfirmed charges

How We Check

We check the invoice against the agreement.

  • A Rate Drifts

    A rate agreed at $480 a day is billed at $520 eighteen months later. No single invoice is worth querying; the cumulative overcharge is what matters.

  • A Discount Is Earned and Not Applied

    The volume threshold is crossed in March and nobody notices, because volume is tracked per site and the discount is earned across all of them.

  • A Surcharge Is Calculated on the Wrong Base

    A fuel surcharge applied at last month's index, or storage charged for a full month on goods collected on the ninth.

  • Payment Terms Differ from the Contract

    The contract says 60 days, the system is set to 45, and payment goes out on receipt.

  • The Same Work Is Billed Twice

    A resubmitted invoice paid alongside the original, or hours billed that exceed what any person could have worked.

Start with a defined set of invoices.

Pick a category or a group of suppliers where there could be risk, run a defined population of invoices through, and let the result decide what happens next. The work starts with invoices already flowing through the business, so your findings emerge in days, with no integration required and no need for a transformation program.

Book a demo

From the team that created contract analytics at Seal Software