How a Freight Forwarder Automated CMR and Carrier Invoice Processing (and Recovered €18k in a Quarter)

Short answer: In 2026 Code2b built a document and invoice-checking system for a freight forwarder in Croatia that recovered about €18k in carrier overcharges in its first quarter. The forwarder, with 14 dispatchers, automated its transport paperwork by having the system read every CMR, delivery note and carrier invoice that lands in the shared inbox, create or update the shipment in the TMS, and compare each carrier invoice with the rate in the original transport order. Anything more than 2% over goes to finance with the difference highlighted. Daily data entry shrank to checking a short exception list.

This is one of the ten projects on our projects page. The client stays anonymous, as all of them do, but the numbers are theirs.

The problem: 120+ documents a day, typed by hand

Every day the dispatch team retyped more than 120 documents into their transport management system: CMRs, delivery notes and carrier invoices. That came to about 3 hours per person, per day.

Two things made it worse than slow:

• Retyping is where errors come from. A weight typed wrong or a pallet count missed shows up weeks later as a dispute.
• Nobody had time to check carrier invoices. Carriers often billed more than the rate agreed in the transport order. With dispatchers buried in data entry, those invoices were paid as they arrived.

The second point is the expensive one. The data entry cost hours. The unchecked invoices cost real money.

What we built

The system has two parts, and both run from the inbox the team already used.

1. Every document is read and filed. When a CMR, delivery note or carrier invoice arrives in the shared inbox, the system reads it: shipment number, weights, pallets, dates and amounts. It then creates the shipment in the TMS, or updates the existing one. Nobody forwards anything to a special folder, and nobody retypes it.

2. Every carrier invoice is checked against the agreed rate. Each invoice is matched to the original transport order and the two prices are compared. If the invoice is more than 2% over the agreed rate, it goes to finance with the difference highlighted, so they can dispute it before paying.

A person stays in the path. The system does the reading, the filing and the comparing. Finance decides what to dispute.

The result

• About €18k in carrier overcharges recovered in the first quarter. These were invoices that would otherwise have been paid as billed.
• Data entry dropped to checking a short exception list. Instead of 3 hours of typing per dispatcher, the team reviews only the documents the system could not read with confidence.

What other logistics teams can take from this

If you run a forwarding or transport business, two questions tell you quickly whether this is worth doing:

1. How many documents does your team retype a day? Anything above a few dozen is hours of work that a system can do, with a person checking the exceptions.
2. Does anyone compare carrier invoices with the agreed rate? If the honest answer is “when we have time”, you are probably paying overcharges you never see.

The tools are less important than the shape: read the document where it arrives, write it into the system you already use, and route only the exceptions to a person. We cover how we price builds like this in how much it costs to automate a business process.

If your dispatch team is retyping paperwork today, a free 20-minute call is enough for us to tell you whether it is worth automating, and what it would save.

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