‍Top-15 North American freight forwarder and customs brokerage operator

We automated invoice intake, matching, duplicate checks, and ERP write-back for a high-volume carrier network while keeping financial controls intact.

Impact

Measured operating results.

MetricBeforeAfterChangeStraight-through processing rate0%71%+71 ptsAverage invoice cycle time9.2 days2.1 days-77%Duplicate payment leakage~$320K/yr~$18K/yr-94%Processing cost per document$14.80$3.90-74%

Operating scale

180,000+ shipments annually across air, ocean, and ground operations in the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Context

Thousands of carrier, port, customs, and drayage invoices arrived every week in inconsistent formats. The AP team was spending its time reading documents, keying ERP records, and resolving avoidable payment issues by hand.

What was broken

• Invoice formats varied widely by carrier, port authority, customs broker, and drayage partner.
• Roughly 18% of invoices arrived without a usable reference number, forcing manual cross-checks across the ERP and shipment systems.
• Duplicate invoices and rebills were creating material payment leakage across overlapping carrier relationships.
• Average invoice cycle time had reached 9.2 days, creating avoidable pressure on working capital and carrier standing.

What Twenty built

• Unified document ingestion across inboxes, portal pulls, and scanned mail, with document classification by invoice type.
• Layout-aware extraction for freight-specific header fields, line items, surcharges, and shipment references.
• Matching logic for 2-way and 3-way controls against rate agreements, shipment completion, and tolerance thresholds.
• Confidence-based routing that pushed routine invoices toward straight-through processing and reserved human review for exceptions.

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