The invoice dispute deadline in your contract

An audit result can be correct and still unusable. That happens when the invoice containing the overcharge is older than the dispute deadline set in the contract.

What this clause actually does

The deadline decides not how many errors we find but whether the errors found are still worth anything. That is why it is the first thing we read in a contract, and why the audit scope is calculated from it rather than from how many invoices you have accumulated.

In practice: if the deadline is seven days from receipt of the invoice, everything older drops out of scope — regardless of how much overcharge is in it. A thirty-day deadline turns the same archive into an entirely different result.

The report therefore states the scope separately: how many documents fall within the window, and how many no longer match it. The second number is often the more interesting one — it shows what the deadline itself costs, as distinct from the carrier’s errors.

A short deadline is not necessarily the final answer

Where the carriage falls within the scope of the CMR Convention, the question arises whether the contractual clause derogates from the Convention. That is a question, not a conclusion: your lawyer provides the answer, and the report presents it as such — with the verbatim quote, the section number, and a note that we do not assess the validity of the clause.

Second, the deadline may not have started to run at all if the invoice received does not meet what the contract itself treats as a proper invoice. That is precisely why the dispute deadline and the itemisation requirement are read together.

What wording to ask for

If the contract is being renegotiated, it helps to have the text ready. This is the one we ask for most often:

Claims concerning an invoice shall be submitted within [30] days of its receipt. The period does not begin to run until an invoice meeting the itemisation requirement has been provided.

The number in square brackets is a matter for negotiation; the second sentence is what protects you from a deadline that starts running from a document you cannot check.