Do your invoices match what was agreed?
Prices, discounts and freight on invoices can drift from contracts — in both directions. Check a fictional contract against its invoices yourself, then ask what the same pattern would mean across a whole invoice population.
Contract against invoices. Line by line.
Each invoice is checked on three points — unit price, volume discount and freight. Every outcome below follows from the documents, not from an estimate.
What would this mean across all your invoices?
Eight invoices prove nothing about a population. So here you set the assumptions — and see historical recovery and future protection side by side, never added together.
Recover, correct or fix? Compare before you decide.
The figures follow your what-if assumptions above. Risk, effort and evidence are fictional judgements for illustration.
| Fictional alternative | Revenue recovered one-time, look-back | Credit notes one-time | Customer risk | Effort | Evidence needed |
|---|
Illustrative what-if results One-time and per-year figures are different things and are not added up. All figures are revenue, not profit.
How a recommendation could read
If your own invoices confirm the pattern, then fixing price data and billing rules first (A) is the low-risk starting point, because it works in both directions. Whether to add back-billing (B) or even-handed corrections (C) depends on the customer relationships involved.
This fictional example does not show that any option is best. Every customer contact and every credit note needs approval from the responsible finance and sales managers.
Keeping the numbers honest
- Identified discrepancy ≠ recoverable revenue. Recovery depends on contract terms, time limits and the customer relationship.
- Overbilling ≠ revenue. It is a refund or credit-note exposure.
- One-time recovery ≠ revenue protected per year. Never add them together.
- Correcting overbilling lowers invoiced revenue — and removes refund, compliance and trust risk.
- Recovered revenue ≠ profit.
- Eight invoices ≠ the whole population. Whether a pattern repeats has to be tested on your data.
- Contracts, amendments and price agreements
- Price and discount master data with change history
- Invoice lines and credit notes
- Correspondence on agreed exceptions
With your own data, an Evidence-based estimate would replace these assumptions — under validation with design partners.
See this stage in the explorer →Is this decision worth checking in your organisation?
A 20-minute conversation is enough to find out whether it is worth a closer look.