For years, Meridian's finance team reconciled carrier invoices by hand. The work was spread across fourteen regional spreadsheets, each maintained slightly differently, with no single place to see what had been charged versus what had been agreed.

The cost showed up in two ways. Disputes dragged on for weeks because tracing a single charge meant cross-referencing files by hand. And because no one could catch duplicate or out-of-contract charges before payment went out, roughly six percent of invoices were overpaid — money that was effectively invisible until well after it had left the building.

Meridian rolled out an automated invoice-matching workflow built around a single reconciliation ledger. They connected their transportation management system directly to that ledger, so every charge could be matched against the contract it belonged to without manual lookup.

On top of the matching layer, the team added rules that flag duplicate charges and anything that falls outside negotiated contract terms — surfacing those exceptions before payment rather than after. Rather than a single switch-over, the rollout ran region by region across one quarter, with two analysts leading enablement so each office adopted the same process.

The impact was immediate and measurable. Reconciliation time fell from 11 days to under 2. Overpayments dropped from 6% to 0.4%, recovering roughly $1.2M in the first year alone.

Just as importantly, the work changed shape. With reconciliation no longer a manual grind, Meridian reallocated two full-time roles away from data entry and toward carrier negotiation — turning a back-office cost center into a function that actively improves contract terms.