We cut what the [back office] costs a freight company.
catuh is a back-office automation service for US freight companies. AI agents read the paperwork, capture what the paperwork leaves out, and check every invoice against the document that proves it: the work that three people do by hand between a load booking and a paid invoice.
One reply from a person, in writing. No demo booking, no sequence.
- load_id
- TR-7702
- broker
- TQL
- linehaul
- $1,840.00
- detention_rate
- $25.00 / hr
- free_hours
- 3h appt / 4h FCFS
- notice_required
- 30 min prior
*A real rate confirmation, TQL PO 23766750, filed in FMCSA docket 2016-0102. The extraction is staged.
In short
Freight back offices pay twice for the same paperwork: once to re-key documents that arrived as documents, and again in the accessorials that get invoiced without their backup and written off when they are refused. Both costs move with who is on shift, which is why neither can be quoted against. We automate the capture first and the typing second, in that order, because no model recovers a time nobody wrote down.
Three jobs, and they are the ones people quit over.
Each one is a place where a document arrives in a form a person then retypes, or where something that mattered was never written down at all. We take them in this order because the second depends on the first being in place and the third depends on both: an invoice cannot be matched to proof that was never captured.
- 01 / 03
Documents that arrive by email
Rate confirmations, bills of lading, proofs of delivery and carrier invoices land in an inbox and someone retypes them into the system. An agent reads the document, pulls the fields and writes them where they belong.
What changes: Nobody keys a load number twice, and the field that was mistyped stops being discovered by the person chasing the payment.
- 02 / 03
The facts nobody writes down
Arrival and departure times, the exception noted at pickup, the check you ran before awarding the load. These are not in any document because nobody recorded them, so no software can extract them. We capture them at the moment they happen.
What changes: The charge has something behind it when it is disputed, recorded at the time rather than reconstructed from memory three weeks later.
- 03 / 03
Invoices and the money they miss
Accessorials get billed without their backup, disputed, and written off one at a time. An agent matches each line to the document that proves it before the invoice goes out.
What changes: Fewer charges refused for a reason you could have fixed before sending them, which is most of the reasons they are refused.
A cost that moves with your staffing is a cost you cannot quote against.
In most freight back offices the expensive half of the job is undocumented. Which broker wants notice before detention starts, which receiver will not sign times unless asked, which accessorial gets refused without its backup. That knowledge sits in people. When they leave it goes with them, and the next person relearns it on your margin.
Put the same knowledge in the process and three things follow. The work costs the same in March as in January. A new hire is productive in days rather than months. And you can finally say what a load costs you to process, which is the number you need before you price anything.
We are not going to tell you what you will save.
Every vendor in this category publishes a percentage. We have no customer figures to publish, and the ones that circulate in freight do not survive a look at their sources. Two sums, countable in an afternoon, and they are yours.
The second sum is usually the surprise. The American Transportation Research Institute found in its 2024 study of driver detention that 94.5% of fleets bill for detention and are paid on fewer than half of those invoices — invoices, not dollars. Nobody we have spoken to had that number for their own operation, because it never appears as a line anywhere: it is written off one refused charge at a time.
| Count this | How | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| The retyping | Documents one person re-keys in a day, times the minutes each takes, times your loaded hourly cost. | The ceiling of what reading documents automatically can give back. |
| The uncollected | Accessorials you invoiced last quarter, minus the ones that were paid. | Money already earned and written off. Usually the larger of the two, and almost nobody has counted it. |
Frequently asked questions
What does catuh actually do?
catuh is a back-office automation service for US freight companies: AI agents that do the work between booking a load and getting the invoice paid. They read the documents that arrive by email and write their fields into your systems, capture the facts no document holds because nobody recorded them, and check each invoice line against the document that proves it. We are a service, not a platform you log into.
How is this different from document automation software?
Extraction software reads what is on the page, and that part works. The problem in freight is that the fields deciding who pays are often the blank ones: the arrival time nobody wrote down, the exception the driver did not note, the carrier check that was run and never filed. No model recovers those, because there is nothing to read. We instrument the capture first and automate on top of it, which is the order most projects get backwards.
Why does back-office cost matter more than it looks?
Because it moves. In most freight back offices the expensive half of the job is undocumented and lives in people, so it leaves when they do and the next person relearns it on your margin. A cost that changes with who is on shift cannot be planned against or quoted against. Standardising it is what makes it a number instead of a feeling.
How much will this save us?
We do not publish a figure, because we do not have one of our own and the percentages that circulate in freight are largely unsupported by the sources cited for them. What we offer instead is the arithmetic: count the documents one person re-keys in a day times the minutes each takes times your loaded hourly cost, and separately take the accessorials you invoiced last quarter minus the ones that were paid. Whichever is larger is the project worth doing.
Do you replace our TMS?
No. The agents write into the system you already pay for, through whatever it accepts: an import, an API, or the same screens a person would fill. Replacing a TMS is a year of work and the most common reason a project like this is abandoned halfway. The paperwork around the TMS is where the recoverable cost actually sits.
Who is this for?
US freight brokers, 3PLs and carriers whose back office is large enough that paperwork is a real line of cost and small enough that losing one experienced person hurts. If your team never re-keys a document and you collect every accessorial you bill, you do not need us and we will say so.
Where the two figures on this page come from.
There are only two, and both are other people's measurements, named here so they can be checked. We publish no savings percentage of our own, because we have no customer figures yet and inventing one is the thing this company exists not to do.
- Costs and Consequences of Truck Driver Detention, September 2024 ATRI · checked 2026-09-25
ATRI measured in 2024 that 94.5% of fleets bill detention and are paid on fewer than half of those invoices.
- FMCSA docket 2016-0102, public comments regulations.gov
The rate confirmation shown in the panel above, filed by the broker as a public comment.
Tell us which part costs you the most.
Not a demo. Describe the process that leaks — what happens, how often, and what it has cost — and you get an answer in writing: whether it is worth automating, what has to be captured first, and roughly what that takes. If it is not worth fixing we will say so.
Or write to support@catuh.com.