What Nobody Audits, You Pay For: Why Our Partnership with Jokati Starts with Logistics Costs

In most logistics departments, there are two line items that never get fully audited. One is the freight invoice, the other is the pallet account. In neither case is this due to negligence — it simply can't be done by the numbers. If you ship 75,000 loads a year, you audit samples. If you exchange load carriers daily, you reconcile at the end of the quarter. And in both cases, you end up paying for whatever you didn't audit.

This is exactly what we're working on together with Jokati. Our shared goal is to make logistics costs transparent and to digitize them. Jokati pursues this with the Digital Freight Office, covering everything from the tender process to fully automated invoice auditing. We pursue the same goal in load carrier management.

For our joint customers, this means significantly less manual effort in invoice auditing, tendering, and pallet management — and above all, less money lost to billing errors and posting mistakes. Both have a direct impact on freight and logistics costs.

About Jokati

Jokati GmbH, headquartered in Hamburg, is an independent digital platform for freight cost management in road transport and the CEP sector. The company connects shippers and freight forwarders and digitizes the entire process — from quote generation to comparison to the analysis of freight rates, covering everything from LTL and partial loads to full truckloads and parcel shipments.

The second building block is automated invoice auditing. Discrepancies between agreed rates and actual billing surface in real time instead of slipping through a spot check. The goal is to make manual Excel analyses and incomplete invoice control obsolete, and to put annual negotiations, tenders, and invoice auditing on a data-driven footing.

Jokati is part of the Digital HUB Logistics in Hamburg and received the Technology for Future Award Logistics in 2023. Typical customers are shippers and freight forwarders whose tenders currently run in Excel and whose freight invoices are onl

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Why Spot Checks Aren't Enough

A sample-based invoice audit finds the errors it happens to hit. It doesn't find systematic errors — and those are exactly the expensive ones, because they recur with every single shipment.

What's interesting is that the freight invoice itself is often correct. The error sits one step earlier, in the data. If an incorrect weight is transmitted via EDI, the carrier bills correctly — just on the wrong basis. The same applies to incorrectly configured diesel floaters, incorrectly transmitted pre-notification codes, or item master data that didn't carry over properly during an SAP migration. This is why an automated audit uncovers not only billing errors, but process and master data errors as well.

That's the point where we recognized ourselves. In pallet management, it's the same pattern: the individual entry usually isn't wrong — it's missing. And what's missing only surfaces during reconciliation with the partner, often months later.

Two Accounts, the Same Gap

The connection came about through a personal contact at a customer who is now a joint customer. In a conversation about digital solutions in logistics, the collaboration with Loopario came up, and both sides quickly saw that there had to be common ground here. Shortly afterward, Philipp and Yannick met in Dortmund and laid the groundwork for the partnership.

The division of labor is straightforward, because the areas don't overlap. Jokati knows freight costs — rate models, accessorial charges, and the typical sources of error in billing. We know the load carrier cycle, its handover points, and the places where accounts drift apart. Both topics hang on the same shipment data, and at the customer, often on the same department.

When Errors Run Unnoticed for Six Months

A typical joint customer has a freight volume of more than eight million euros per year, a heterogeneous product mix, and over 75,000 shipments. Tender documents are put together manually. Shipment data has to be

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What's Coming Next

As next steps, we're expanding our joint customer visits and taking a closer look at the first joint customers in live operation. The most interesting question here: freight cost structure and load carrier movement hang on the same shipments. There's more to be made of that than two separate analyses, and that's exactly what we're working on.

One thing surprised us along the way. The assumption was that we share the same target customers, and that these customers pursue the same goals — digitizing processes and reducing costs. What we didn't expect was how immediately that assumption would be confirmed in the first joint projects. And the exchange really is direct, fast, and practical. Plenty of partnerships set out to do that; very few actually pull it off.

Do You Know How Much You Overpaid Last Year?

The combination is particularly interesting for shippers with annual freight spend above 250,000 euros who currently run their tenders manually or in Excel and audit their freight invoices only on a sample basis. It's equally relevant for freight forwarders who want their incoming self-billing credits audited, and for anyone running a pallet account alongside their freight.

Getting started takes four things: the carrier's current freight rates, the freight invoices from the past twelve months, the shipment data transmitted daily, and a few hours for a joint workshop. From there we build the setup, a potential analysis, and the foundation for working together. Implementation and go-live follow within four to six weeks.

Send us your numbers from last year. Usually a look at the invoice data is enough to see whether the leverage sits with freight, with the pallet account, or with both.

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