Freight GL Coding, Solved: How Intelligent Audit Turns Chaos into Clarity

Your TMS spits out hundreds of freight invoices. Your finance team grills you over mismatched charges. And just when you think you’ve caught up, another invoice appears—packed with mystery accessorials that never matched the quote.

Welcome to the world of General Ledger (GL) coding in logistics.

It’s not glamorous, and it’s definitely not easy. But it’s critical. GL coding—the process of assigning freight charges to the correct general ledger accounts—is the foundation of clean, accurate, and actionable shipping data. Get it wrong, and you’re staring down a month’s worth of finance meetings. Get it right, and you unlock a powerful lever for cost savings and smarter decision-making.

What is GL Coding, Really?

GL coding isn’t just a finance function—it’s how you make sure every dollar in your logistics budget lands where it belongs. At its core, freight GL coding is the process of allocating shipping charges to the right accounts, departments, and cost centers for accurate financial reporting and smarter spend management.

Most shippers aren’t coding each accessorial charge individually—they’re working at the directional and cost center level, tagging shipments as inbound or outbound and assigning them to the appropriate plant or business unit. But even at that level, precision matters. One miscode can distort your financial visibility across regions, skew your cost-per-unit calculations, and complicate quarterly planning.

Done right, GL coding enables better budgeting, more accurate P&L statements, and stronger alignment between logistics and finance. It’s not just about satisfying auditors—it’s about unlocking a clearer view of your supply chain’s true financial performance.

Because when your CFO asks, “Where is our money going?”—you need to know. Down to the last dollar.

When Manual Becomes a Mess

Let’s face it: humans aren’t great at repetitive tasks. Typos, inconsistencies, and inter-departmental finger-pointing are inevitable when you’re managing thousands of codes by hand. Is that trade show shipment a marketing expense or part of distribution? Did that residential delivery fee get coded to the right cost center—or did it quietly disappear into “miscellaneous”?

And when every department has its own version of the truth, reconciliation becomes a never-ending game of spreadsheet whack-a-mole.

Automate or Agonize

That’s where automation changes the game.

At Intelligent Audit, we’ve spent nearly 30 years building a platform that takes the pain out of freight accounting. Our Financial, Audit, Recovery, and Business Intelligence (FARBI) solution automates the GL coding process at scale—eliminating manual entry, enforcing consistency, and ensuring that every invoice is coded correctly, every time.

With Intelligent Audit, shippers can:

• Validate and assign GL codes in real-time with pre-configured templates and business rules
• Integrate seamlessly with ERP systems to enable accurate cost allocation without duplicating efforts
• Flag discrepancies automatically, catching billing errors and mismatched charges before they hit the books
• Create a single source of financial truth for shipping costs across teams, departments, and carriers

The result? Clean data, faster reporting, and fewer fire drills at month-end.

Smarter Spending, Stronger Margins

As shipping costs rise and margins tighten, knowing exactly where every dollar is going isn’t a luxury—it’s a necessity. Accurate GL coding helps your finance team track spending trends, your operations team identify inefficient lanes, and your leadership team plan with confidence. It’s the connective tissue between logistics and profitability.

And while others stay stuck in the past—manually sorting invoices and second-guessing expense categories—you’ll be miles ahead, making data-driven decisions and maximizing ROI with every shipment.

Freight Finance Tools That Actually Scale

Intelligent Audit isn’t just a freight audit company. Our platform brings together freight audit and recovery, real-time analytics, automated cost allocation, and financial visibility—designed to scale with your business, whether you ship 500 or 500,000 packages a day.

It’s why 20% of the Fortune 50 trust us to process more than $1 billion in shipping costs annually. We don’t just audit. We help you act—with financial clarity that drives smarter shipping and stronger performance.

Ready to Fix the Freight Finance Headache?

If your team is still chasing down invoices or coding freight charges by hand, it’s time for a better way. With Intelligent Audit, you can stop playing defense and start using freight data as a competitive edge.

Want to see how much money you’re leaving on the table? Let us show you where to find it.

Get started with Intelligent Audit today.

‍