About
Why this exists
A freight quotation is not a price. It is a price for a named subset of the work, and the charges that hurt are almost never the ones printed on it — they are the ones it never mentions, and the ones that accrue per day with no ceiling.
Large importers handle this with a freight audit department or an enterprise contract that includes one. Everybody else opens the invoice, notices it is nine hundred dollars more than expected, cannot tell which part of that is normal, and pays it — because the alternative is spending an afternoon they do not have arguing about a charge they cannot evidence, with a supplier they need again next month.
ChargeBasis is built for that second group. It reads the quotation and the invoice, pairs the charges by what they actually are rather than by how they are worded, and reports which part of the difference the documents already explain and which part nothing on file explains yet.
What it deliberately will not do
Most of the design decisions here are refusals, and they are the reason to trust the parts that do produce an answer.
It will not tell you what you are owed
Gross variance is arithmetic. Treating it as recoverable money is the fastest way to start a conversation with a provider badly, so the two figures are reported separately and the smaller one is always presented as needing evidence rather than as a claim.
It will not invent a number
Every amount, every match, every day count and every conclusion is produced by deterministic code that can be re-run and tested. A language model may read a document into a strict schema; it decides nothing. A figure that cannot be traced back to a line on a page has no business in a conversation with your supplier.
It will not send anything on your behalf
Correspondence is drafted from findings, then it stops. Approval is a separate, explicit step, and what leaves afterwards is copied, downloaded or opened in your own email client — so the message to your provider comes from you, in your words, on your account.
It will not accuse anyone
Drafts ask for the document that would settle a charge. They do not allege anything, because at that stage there is nothing to allege — you are missing information, not looking at wrongdoing. Most unexplained charges turn out to be perfectly supported once the certificate or the receipt arrives.
It will not charge you a share of anything
No success fee, no commission, no percentage of a credit. A percentage would price identical work at C$18 on a small credit and C$1,250 on a large one, and it would give the product a reason to want your variance to be large. It charges per check or per month, and nothing else.
Who runs it
ChargeBasis is a small, independent operation based in Alberta, Canada. It is not venture funded, it is not a division of a freight forwarder, and it has no commercial relationship with any carrier, broker or provider whose invoices it reads. There is nobody it would be awkward to produce a finding about.
It is not a law firm and does not give legal advice. Whether a particular charge is contractually owed depends on your agreement, the applicable trading conditions and the facts of the shipment — questions for a solicitor who works in freight. What this does is establish what your documents support, which is the part you need settled before anyone else gets involved.
Questions, including awkward ones about how a finding was reached, go to support@chargebasis.com and are answered by the person who built it.
See it before you trust it
There is a complete worked example on this site — a real analysis of a fictional shipment, with every finding, every citation and the correspondence drafted at the end of it. No account, no upload, nothing to sign up for.
The commercial terms are in the terms of service, and what is stored and for how long is in the privacy notice.