READ-ONLY VARIANCE AUDIT

Find the money leaking between what you paid and what arrived.

Your freight bill and your receiving records describe the same shipment, but the freight bill is only ever checked against the carrier contract, never against what actually arrived. Apotheus joins them on your purchase orders, finds every gap in exact dollars, and proposes the likely cause and who to recover it from. A retrospective audit, on your own history.

Request a discovery audit See a sample audit

A historical data export is all it takes. No system access, nothing written, nothing changes.

VARIANCE AUDIT · ACME LOGISTICS
READ-ONLY
RECOVERABLE FOUND
$41,820
3.1% of $1.34M audited spend
PRECISION
0.91
confirmed by you, line by line
DETERMINISTIC · EXACT $ AI ATTRIBUTION · HYPOTHESIS
PO-90012
billed 100% · recv 70% · $294
HYP 0.90CROSS-DOMAINCARRIER
Short-shipment billed at full rate
PO-90188
duplicate bill · $840
HYP 0.95CARRIER
Same freight bill submitted twice
DETERMINISTIC $ · HYPOTHESIZED CAUSE illustrative
RECONCILES  →  FREIGHT INVOICES · RECEIVING · PO / ASN NO LLM TOUCHES THE NUMBERS
THE SEAM

The three-way match checks the goods. The freight bill rides past it.

Your AP team already runs a three-way match: purchase order, goods receipt, and the merchandise invoice, reconciled before payment. But the freight is a separate carrier bill that never lands on a goods-receipt line, so it is checked only against the carrier contract, never against what physically arrived. And even the goods match tends to break on partial receipts and unit-of-measure mismatches. That is the seam, and the money leaks there.

COST SIDE · WHAT YOU PAID
Freight invoices & rates
Carrier bills, accessorials, the contracted rate. A freight audit checks these against the contract on one axis only.
THE JOIN THE CRUX
Matched on PO / ASN
The purchase order ties a bill to a delivery. Without that link there is nothing to reconcile across the two sides. It is the whole idea.
PHYSICAL SIDE · WHAT ARRIVED
Receiving & inventory
What the warehouse logged, plus any adjustment. A warehouse count checks these against themselves, never the bill.
WHY THE OBVIOUS TOOLS MISS IT
ERP three-way match
PO, goods receipt, merchandise invoice, reconciled before payment. The right idea, for the goods. Freight rides a separate carrier bill that never hits a receipt line, and the match itself breaks on partial receipts and UoM.
Freight-audit tools
Understand logistics, but reconcile one narrow axis: the carrier bill vs. the contract. Never against the physical receipt.
Data-observability tools
Check that tables match. They don't understand that a PO ties a freight bill to a receipt.
Master-data projects
Enterprise-weight, rip-and-replace. The opposite of a low-barrier, read-only audit.
HOW IT WORKS

Four steps from two exports to a number you can dispute.

You send a historical export from both sides plus your POs. The engine does the rest.

01
Ingest both sides
Invoices + rates (cost) and receiving + adjustments (physical). CSV exports, any column names. No integration.
02
Join on PO / ASN
Each cost record is matched to its physical record. A cost gap and a physical gap become one reconciled event.
03
Reconcile in exact $
Plain, deterministic math computes every discrepancy in dollars. Reproducible, dispute-ready. No AI near the numbers.
04
Attribute, and route
An AI proposes the likely root cause and who to recover from: a carrier claim, a supplier debit, or a timing artifact. Always a scored hypothesis, never changing a number. You confirm.
WORKED EXAMPLE · ONE RECONCILIATION UNIT
DETERMINISTIC
INGEST
COST  INV-2231 · billed $980
PHYS  RCV-118 · recv 70/100
JOIN
Matched cost & physical on PO-90012
RECONCILE
billed 100% · recv 70% $294
ATTRIBUTE
HYP 0.90 Billed full, received short. One recoverable event.
WHY YOU CAN TRUST IT

The numbers are exact. The explanations are clearly marked guesses.

The same wall runs through the whole system, because the numbers and the explanations are different in kind and must never be blended. It's enforced in the code itself: a test fails the build if the math layer so much as imports the AI.

DETERMINISTIC CORE
The dollars: exact, no AI
Matching and variance math are pure, typed, and property-tested against thousands of random inputs. A number it produces is reproducible and auditable.
ATTRIBUTION LAYER
The "why": a labeled hypothesis
The AI proposes a root cause from a fixed set, scored by confidence, and the likely counterparty to recover from. It can never change a number, only suggest the story behind one.
PRECISION, NOT RECALL

Be the reviewer.

Confirm or reject each proposed cause on the right. Precision counts only what you confirm, so fewer, correct findings beat many speculative ones.

·
confirmed precision
0 of 5 reviewed
PROPOSED CAUSES · CONFIRM OR REJECT
Calibration is reported too: of causes asserted at 0.8, about 80% should hold up.
WHAT YOU GET

A variance audit of your own history.

A self-contained, print-ready report: recoverable dollars next to their denominator and the precision figure, money broken down by cause, and every finding with the deterministic columns visually separated from the AI attribution. Cross-domain findings, the ones a freight auditor can't see, lead.

You show a prospect the leakage in their own history. The report is the proof.

Recoverable headline beside its denominator & precision
Recoverable-by-cause breakdown
Each finding framed as a broken audit assertion
Each finding routed to a likely counterparty: carrier claim, supplier debit, or timing
RECOVERABLE BY CAUSE
$41,820
Short-shipment, billed full CROSS-DOMAIN $18,240
Duplicate freight bill $11,400
Carrier re-weigh over manifest $7,930
Accessorial mis-tier $4,250
METHODOLOGY
Deterministic $ from typed, property-tested math. Each cause, and its likely counterparty (carrier, supplier, or timing), is a scored hypothesis a human confirms. We surface and route the gap; we do not decide the claim for you. Not a statutory financial-statement audit.
THE POSTURE

Read-only, low-risk, and honest about where we are.

Apotheus is early. We're running discovery audits with a handful of design partners to prove, on real data, that the money is there.

Read-only by design
Sample and historical files only. No access to your live TMS, ERP, or WMS. Nothing is ever written to any system.
Your data never leaves your walls
The engine is self-hosted and single-tenant. Files are processed in memory; nothing is sent anywhere or persisted.
Built by an operator
From supply-chain data ops and logistics systems. This is the seam we kept watching money fall through.

See what's leaking in your own history.

Send a read-only export of your freight invoices, receiving, and POs. We'll run a variance audit and walk the findings with you.

We're onboarding a few design partners. Drop your email and we'll be in touch.