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Solution · Finance & accountingThe order is complete, the delivery document is on file, and the invoice leaves the same day
Freight billed the day it is delivered, not the month after
Billing is released order by order as soon as delivery is proven and every recorded extra is priced; on the cost side only differences between a subcontractor invoice and the order reach a person.
Executive summary
Orders wait for the month-end billing run, and the accessorials written on a driver's note are never billed.
Mientha delivers billing as a continuous release rather than a run.
An order becomes an invoice the day it is complete, so the payment term starts weeks earlier and less revenue is financed by the company.
the finance system for invoicing and posting; the TMS, where invoice number and date return; the SharePoint evidence archive
Business problem
Freight settlement
A forwarder earns money moving freight and gets paid by producing paper about it. The price is agreed when the order is placed, but the invoice waits until someone is sure the load was delivered and knows which extras apply. That proof travels back with a driver, and the extras are written by hand in its margin.
Because one invoice takes a person to assemble, offices batch the work into a monthly run, or a weekly one for the largest accounts. An operational delay becomes a financing decision nobody made. In Poland the payment term between private undertakings as a rule may not exceed 60 days, and it starts at the invoice date: a load delivered on the third and invoiced on the thirty-first has spent 28 days in front of that term. Accessorials leak in the same gap, because detention, an extra stop or a pallet exchange arrive as free text on a driver's note.
The cost side is the mirror image. Carrier invoices arrive weeks after the load, in any format a small haulier produces, often quoting the carrier's own reference rather than the order number. Until each is matched, the margin on a load is an estimate and accruals are built by hand.
How it works today
Common to forwarders of this size, whatever the TMS.
- SystemThe forwarder closes the order in the TMS when the truck is unloaded and the status turns to delivered
- WaitingThe signed consignment note travels back with the driver or by post and reaches the office days later
- PersonA clerk opens the order, the rate agreement and the scanned document, then builds the invoice by hand
- Risk of errorDetention, extra stops and pallet exchange are free text on a note; what nobody transcribes is never billed
- WaitingInvoices go out in a weekly or monthly run, so an order delivered early in the period waits for it
- PersonCarrier invoices arrive by email in every format and are matched to the order and rate by hand
- Risk of errorDifferences surface at payment, so the load's margin stays unknown and month-end cost is accrued from a spreadsheet
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The cost grows where nobody is looking.
- Cash is the largest item and never appears in a budget: every day between delivery and invoice is a day the company finances its own revenue, in front of a term already long.
- Accessorials nobody transcribes are not billed, and they carry the best margin on an order: waiting time, a second drop, a pallet exchange, a night outside a customs office.
- Disputes age badly. A detention charge questioned in December for a July load starts a search through mailboxes, depot trays and a driver's phone costing more than the charge.
- Margin per load lags. Until the carrier invoice is matched, nobody knows whether the load made money, so the next quotation rests on last year's assumptions.
Cost of inaction
Working capital is the part these rows cannot price. At an illustrative €480 per order, 6,800 orders a month is about €3.3 million of revenue, so each day of lag costs roughly €109,000 of the company's own cash, and taking fourteen days out releases close to €1.5 million once. Statutory interest for late payment in Polish commercial transactions runs at the NBP reference rate plus ten percentage points, and none of it accrues while the invoice is unissued: an unbilled delivery is not a late payment, it is a loan given without noticing.
The cost side is quieter and as expensive. Carrier cost is accrued by hand, so a month's margin is an estimate corrected in the next one, and a dispute raised weeks after the load meets a carrier who has already closed the file.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A Central European road forwarder and carrier: about 70 own vehicles, roughly 190 subcontracted carriers, 240 staff, a TMS, a finance system, Microsoft 365 E3 with Power BI Pro.
6,800 transport orders billed a month, roughly 60% domestic and 40% international; 2,400 carrier invoices, mostly PDF by email; about one order in six carries an accessorial.
Billing runs weekly for the largest customers and monthly for the rest. A clerk opens each order, checks the document is on file, reads the rate, adds whatever extras are legible and issues the invoice. A second clerk matches every carrier invoice to its order and rate.
About seven minutes per document on both sides, 9,200 documents a month, and a delivery-to-invoice lag of 12 to 30 days. Accessorials reach an invoice only when somebody transcribes them.
Robots watch the TMS for completed orders, confirm the delivery document is on file, price each order from the agreed rate and its recorded accessorials, and invoice through the required channel. Carrier invoices are read by UiPath Document Understanding and matched to the order, the rate and the delivery evidence; only differences reach a person, in Teams with the evidence attached.
In the modelled case the lag falls to the day the order is complete, every recorded accessorial reaches an invoice, and settlement stops being monthly. These figures model the scenario; none was measured.
Proposed solution
Mientha delivers billing as a continuous release rather than a run. For each customer we write a release rule: the order is closed as delivered in the TMS, the delivery document is in the archive, a rate exists for the lane and period, and every recorded accessorial is priced or waived. Robots test that rule several times a day, so a load delivered before lunch can be invoiced the same afternoon.
The rate comes from the customer's agreement, held as a versioned table with validity dates or read from the TMS where the sale price already lives. An accessorial is priced only where the order carries evidence for it: a detention charge exists because a recorded arrival and departure support it. The invoice leaves through the channel that customer requires, from structured e‑invoicing to a portal upload.
On the cost side the same engine runs in reverse. Carrier invoices in the settlement mailbox are read by UiPath Document Understanding and matched to your order, by reference or, where the carrier quotes its own, by carrier, date, route and amount, then checked against the purchase rate and delivery evidence. Invoices that agree post without a person; differences become a dispute task in Microsoft Teams carrying the order, the rate and the proof of delivery. Where a customer self-bills, the same engine reconciles their document against your orders. Only document reading uses machine learning.
UiPath Document Understanding pre-trained Invoices model with Validation Station in Action Center; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365 and Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint; UiPath Action Center actionable notifications in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft Teams Approvals; Power BI
The release rule per customer, the pricing model for rates and accessorials, invoice assembly and channel routing, the matching engine with reason codes and tolerances, the self-billing reconciliation, the Teams dispute queue and the Power BI dashboard
TMS orders, statuses and rates through its API or a scheduled export; invoice creation, e‑invoice submission and carrier posting through your finance system; portal upload by robot where none exists
How the automated process works
- AutomationRobots read completed orders from the TMS several times a day and test each against its release rule
- AutomationOrders that pass are priced from the rate, the surcharge and their recorded accessorials, and the invoice is created
- SystemThe invoice goes out through the required channel with the delivery document attached, and its number returns to the order
- PersonOrders that fail become an Action Center task in Teams: document missing, accessorial unpriced, no rate
- AutomationCarrier invoices reaching the settlement mailbox are read by Document Understanding and matched to order, rate and evidence
- PersonDifferences above tolerance become a dispute task in Teams with the evidence attached; invoices that agree post without a person
- AutomationPower BI refreshes unbilled orders by age, accessorial capture and margin per load, and the exception list reaches Teams
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Testing every completed order against its release rule and pricing it from the rate, surcharge and recorded accessorials
- Creating and submitting the invoice through the required channel, with the delivery document attached
- Reading carrier and self-billed documents, matching them to order, rate and evidence, and posting those that agree
- Chasing what is missing: the document not yet back, the accessorial nobody priced, the invoice with no order
People decide
- Whether an accessorial recorded by a driver is billable to this customer under this contract
- Whether a difference on a carrier invoice is accepted, disputed or settled, on the evidence in the task
- Rates, surcharge formulas, tolerances and release rules, which stay with the commercial and finance teams
- Credit notes and write-offs above the threshold, approved in the Microsoft Teams Approvals app
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- completed orders, statuses and rates from the TMS
- delivery documents from the SharePoint archive
- carrier and self-billed invoices from the settlement mailbox
- rate agreements and accessorial lists as versioned tables
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Document Understanding
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
Target systems
- the finance system for invoicing and posting
- the TMS, where invoice number and date return
- the SharePoint evidence archive
- Power BI
Human touchpoints: Action Center tasks in Microsoft Teams; Microsoft Teams Approvals for credit notes; the daily exception list in a Teams channel
Technologies used
reads carrier and self-billed invoices whatever the layout; Validation Station for low-confidence fields
Aqueue orders and invoices, run the release and matching rules, post, retry and log
Amailbox intake; rate tables and evidence in your tenant
Ablocked orders and carrier disputes completed as tasks in Teams
Acredit notes, write-offs and rate exceptions approved by the owner
Aunbilled orders by age, accessorial capture, margin per load, invoice ageing
Aorders, statuses and rates in; invoices and postings out
CIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
Two queues are added together here because they cost the same to work: 6,800 orders waiting to be billed and 2,400 carrier invoices waiting to be matched, at seven minutes each. €23 an hour is a fully loaded cost for settlement work in Central European road transport. Desk time is all this prices; unbilled accessorials and the cash carried between delivery and invoice sit in the next section.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- An order becomes an invoice the day it is complete, so the payment term starts weeks earlier and less revenue is financed by the company
- Every recorded accessorial reaches the invoice, including the detention and second drops billed today only when somebody notices
- Margin on a load is known when the carrier invoice is posted, not when a clerk finds time to match it
- Disputes on both sides open with their evidence attached, so the exchange is about the order, the rate and the document
- Order growth and peak weeks are absorbed by the rule rather than by overtime on the billing desk
The management view
- Settlement becomes a queue with an age rather than a monthly event: how much delivered revenue is unbilled, and what blocks each order
- Revenue leakage turns into a measurable exception, because an accessorial recorded and not billed is now visible
- Each customer's billing conditions live in a written rule, not in the habits of the clerk on that account
- More orders and more subcontractors stop translating into more people on the settlement desk
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- Robots read the TMS and the mailbox under their own service accounts, with Microsoft Graph access scoped to the settlement mailbox alone, and write to the finance system only through the interfaces it exposes
- An invoice is a legal document, so the release rule, the rate version and the evidence behind it are stored with it, and no robot bills a rate that exists in no table
- Order data, delivery documents and the audit record stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, and the automations run from the EU region of UiPath Automation Cloud
- Duties stay apart: the robot posts, the forwarder releases a blocked order, the finance owner approves credit notes in Teams, and a rate change needs a second person
Why now
Mandatory KSeF started in Poland on 1 February 2026, so a domestic sales invoice exists when the system accepts it, not when the office produces a PDF; releasing order by order suits that better than a monthly run.
Cash is the argument a CFO recognises: the payment term between private undertakings in Poland as a rule may not exceed 60 days, and every day a delivered load waits to be invoiced is added in front of it. The wait also costs €24,687 a month of desk time in the modelled case.
What was once a development project is now configuration: a pre-trained invoice model, connectors for Outlook and SharePoint, tasks completed in Teams, Power BI on the tenant you run.
Relevant executive roles
Revenue is invoiced weeks earlier and carrier cost matched as it arrives, so working capital and reported margin stop depending on when somebody reached the pile
More orders and more subcontractors can be taken on without adding people to settle them, which is where growth in this sector stalls
Forwarders stop chasing paperwork for billing and see only the orders that cannot be released
Common questions and objections
Some will not, so the rule is per customer: continuous release where it is accepted, a scheduled run where a contract or portal requires one. Even then the invoice is ready on the day of delivery.
Layout variety is what a document model is for, and it improves on your carriers' documents through the corrections your team already makes. Harder is the reference, and where a carrier omits your order number the match runs on other fields.
Then the engine runs the other way: their document is reconciled against your orders, rates and accessorials, and differences go back with the evidence. Reconciling a document you did not write is what gets skipped by hand.
When this is not the right solution
- Fewer than a few hundred orders a month, where a weekly routine on the billing desk costs less than automation
- Orders and delivery documents are not held against a common reference, so a release rule has nothing to test; capturing the consignment note comes first
- Prices are agreed by telephone per load and never written back, so there is no rate to bill from
A question for the next management meeting
Why does a load delivered on the third of the month get invoiced on the thirty-first, and who in this company owns each of those twenty-eight days?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- Three months of orders and invoices read end to end: the lag by customer, why orders wait, and how often a recorded accessorial never reached an invoice
- The release rule per customer: what must be true before an order may be billed, and who is asked when it is not
- The pricing model and invoice assembly: rates, surcharge formulas and accessorial lists as versioned tables, with routing to each customer's channel
- The matching engine with reason codes and tolerances, the self-billing reconciliation and the dispute queue in Teams
- The Power BI dashboard and daily exception list, a runbook for the billing desk, a pilot on one customer group and then rollout with hypercare
We need from you
- Three months of transport orders with their invoice dates, and the matching carrier invoices as sent
- Current rate agreements, surcharge formulas and accessorial lists, plus the billing conditions large customers impose
- Access to the TMS by API or export, a test client on the finance system, a mailbox service account and a process owner
Stages
Discovery
Billing lag by customer, order and document quality, accessorial capture, invoice formats
Design
Release rules, pricing model, tolerances, dispute policy, channel routing, security model
Build
Rate tables, release and matching engines, invoice assembly, Teams touchpoints, Power BI
Validation
Three months of history replayed against the rules and compared with what was billed
Go-live and tuning
Customer group by customer group, supervised at first, then tuned on live volumes
Departmental. Effort follows the billing conditions your customers impose, whether the TMS exposes orders and rates through an interface, and how consistently accessorials are recorded.
Delivered on the third, invoiced on the thirty-first, argued about in December.
Send us one month of delivered orders with their invoice dates and one month of carrier invoices. We return the billing lag by customer, the accessorials that never reached an invoice, and a first release rule.
Measure your delivery-to-invoice lagThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Freight is delivered, invoiced and disputed before anyone finds the signed document.
View solution Supply chainTransport orders into the TMS without retypingNinety customers, ninety ways of sending an order, and a forwarder retyping every one into the TMS.
View solution Supply chainFreight invoice audit against rate cards and shipmentsCarrier invoices are checked on a sample and paid in full; the overbilled lines are the ones nobody opened.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenTransport & logistics