Buy Template
New
1,900 hrs
returned to the payables team each month
$412K
in duplicate payments caught in the first quarter
4 hrs
from invoice received to approved (was 3 days)
At a glance
Company
Saltmarsh Logistics
Size
2,300 employees · freight and warehousing across North America
Agents
Tessa
Systems connected
ERP, shared payables inbox, carrier portal, payments, team chat
Live in
24 days
The challenge
Saltmarsh moves freight for 1,200 shippers, and every load creates paperwork: carrier invoices, fuel surcharges, detention fees, warehouse bills. By 2025 the payables team of 22 was processing about 38,000 invoices a month, mostly by hand: keying line items from PDFs into the ERP and chasing operations for proof of delivery. Duplicates slipped through when carriers re-sent invoices under new numbers. Month-end close took eight working days, and the team had stopped taking early-payment discounts because invoices were rarely approved in time.
What they put in place
Saltmarsh started Tessa on carrier invoices only, the highest-volume and most repetitive work. Tessa reads each invoice from the shared inbox and the carrier portal, matches it to the load in the ERP and to the proof of delivery, and queues it for the weekly payment run.
Nadia Mensah, the controller, set the guardrails herself. Tessa approves only within 2% of the agreed rate, never changes vendor records and never releases a payment. Any mismatch above tolerance, any change of bank details and any invoice over $25,000 goes to a named approver in team chat, with the invoice, the load record and the reason attached. Fuel surcharges were added in month two, once shadow mode showed Tessa matching them the way the team would.
Rollout
Day 1: Kickoff. Targets: 70% of carrier invoices matched without a touch, and no duplicate payments.
Days 2–6: Read-only access to the ERP, the payables inbox and the carrier portal.
Days 7–12: Guardrails set and replayed against 31,000 invoices from the previous month.
Days 13–23: Shadow mode. The team approved 93% of Tessa’s matches without edits.
Day 24: Live on carrier invoices.
Month 2: Fuel surcharges and warehouse bills added.
Results
Within a quarter, Tessa was matching 81% of carrier invoices without a person touching them, against a target of 70%. The team now spends its time on exceptions, on carrier relationships and on the analysis it never had time for.
Duplicate detection caught $412,000 in repeat invoices in the first quarter, most of them re-sent by carriers under a new number. Approval time fell from three days to four hours, which brought early-payment discounts back: $96,000 in the first two quarters. Month-end close now takes five working days instead of eight.
Tessa took the keying off our desks, and the exceptions got better attention because of it. The controls were what sold me: she can’t pay anyone, and she can’t touch a vendor record.
Nadia Mensah
Controller
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by Jeeth