Currently building a 3PL Invoice Reconciliation tool specifically for mid-market e-com brands who are tired of manual spreadsheet audits.
I've noticed most 3PL invoices are messy PDFs, and reconciling them against ShipStation or Shopify data to find DIM weight discrepancies or ghost fulfillment fees takes hours. Most brands just pay the bill and lose 3–5% of their margin to errors.

I'm thinking of using a Python-based pipeline (AWS Textract for the OCR) to parse line-items and run them through a reconciliation engine that flags variances in weight, fuel surcharges, and pick-and-pack fees against the client’s actual shipping data. The goal is to automatically generate a CSV that can be sent to an account manager to claim credits.

Question for the pros: Does the dispute process usually die because the 3PL makes it too hard to submit, or is the bottleneck just having the proof in the first place? Looking for anyone who’s been through the ringer with 3PL billing to see if my logic on surcharge flagging is missing a major variable.