Kawas Aga - New York, September 16, 2026
If you run freight, you already know the ground keeps shifting. Tariffs are not a headline, they are a line item. Capacity is fine until it is not.
Everyone says AI will fix it, then hands you a vague roadmap. I spend my days in conversations with shippers who want something simpler and sharper. A budget they can defend and leverage they can use. The fastest path is hiding in plain sight. Your freight audit data is not a back-office chore. It is your operating system for 2026.
Below is how I use it to forecast with confidence, walk into vendor meetings without flinching, and control the controllable when volatility is the only constant.
The overlooked power of freight audit data
Most teams treat an audit like a receipt check. I treat it like an X-ray. It shows where money leaks, why it leaks, and which partners or processes drive it.
When you connect terminal events to contracted terms, the picture sharpens fast.
What I look at first:
⟶ Accessorial patterns. Detention, demurrage, per diem, storage, chassis. Not noise. These are trendlines by terminal and lane that highlight where detention and demurrage charges, as well as process discipline, are breaking.
⟶ Rate and terms adherence. Is free time honored according to your contract and the literal terminal milestones, or are you paying for bad timestamp logic and rule interpretation?
⟶ Service failures that create cost. Missed appointments, rolled bookings, late drays. Tie each event to actual dollars, and you stop arguing about opinions in QBRs.
⟶ Lane and facility concentration. Leakage is never evenly distributed. Two terminals and three corridors usually drive most of the pain. Target them.
⟶ Dispute and credit velocity. Win rate, time to credit, and pre-payment catch rate shape cash flow and the reliability of your budget.
This is how you calculate true landed cost instead of hope. With BlueCargo, we validate invoices line by line against terminal data before payment; a true pre-audit on top of our legacy post-audit system; auto-flag and dispute mismatches, and centralize visibility for Ops, Finance, and Procurement.
In practice, customers catch about 30 percent more invalid charges than standard audits and often recover six and seven figures because patterns get exposed, not just one-off errors.
2026 reality check: tariffs, AI, and what to do about it
Tariffs are the "new normal".
They are not getting walked back quickly, so plan like they are here. Separate tariff exposed spend that you must model from operational leakage that you should refuse to fund. Build a habit of constant adaptation. Monthly scenario runs, quarterly checkpoint resets, and playbooks for lane shifts and partner changes. If you can anticipate the industry’s needs two months early, you win the budget and the negotiation.
AI that actually helps.
Useful models do not re chew the world on every click. Freight has durable signals. Terminal milestones versus contract terms, dispute outcomes by partner, and accessorial triggers by facility, patterns best handled with automated invoice matching. Recompute weekly or every other week and you keep the brain fresh without wasting time and money. That cadence is fast enough to spot trend breaks and slow enough to be affordable.
Build or buy, decide with ROI not pride.
Building can look cheaper on a slide. Then reality hits. Data engineering time, model tuning, terminal idiosyncrasies, contract parsing, and a dispute pipeline that Finance will trust. If speed and quality drop, the savings vanish in bad decisions. Buying a Tech platform that already understands terminal data and contracts often means better thinking, faster. Pay a little more for accuracy and velocity, recover a lot more by catching leakage early. That trade is rational, not ideological.
Make it actionable for 2026:
- Segment your spend. Tariff exposed versus controllable leakage, with explicit owners and monthly targets.
- Lock a decision calendar. Weekly or bi weekly model recompute, monthly variance review with Finance, and quarterly renegotiation windows with vendors.
- Pick three high impact fixes. One routing change, one SLA clause update, and one process guardrail at the worst terminal or lane. Measure the run rate change within 30 days.
- Bring proof to every meeting. Rate and terms adherence, accessorial heat maps, dispute win rates, and cycle times. Walk in with the same packet you used to build the budget. That makes the conversation equal and productive.
Where BlueCargo fits:
In a tariff heavy environment, teams are struggling to account for millions that are displaced.
You cannot move macro policy, but you can stop paying money you do not owe. BlueCargo matches terminal events to your contracted terms before payment, auto flags and disputes invalid charges, and gives Ops, Finance, and Procurement one source of truth. That is how you control the controllable.
You turn patterns into policy. You get back guaranteed money that should never have left the building. Then you lock those improvements into your 2026 plan so volatility becomes a managed assumption, not a budget surprise.
Control the controllable, CHAINge takeaways
At CHAINge in Columbus, one line stuck with me. Craig Jones, VP of Supply Chain at On Cloud Running, framed today’s job simply. Control the controllable. In the same room, a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce reminded everyone that volatility is not going away and tariffs are easy to impose but hard to unwind.
Put those together and the mandate is clear: stop betting the plan on what you can’t move, and harden what you can with smarter supply chain cost control.
For 2026 that means:
⟶ Anchor budgets to terminal reality, not wishful averages. Validate every invoice against actual milestones and contracted terms before money leaves the building.
⟶ Turn patterns into policy. When a lane, terminal, or partner drives fees, do not monitor. Rewrite routing, appointment windows, SLAs, and buffer rules.
⟶ Bring proof to the table. Show adherence to rate and terms, accessorial heat maps, dispute win rates, and cycle times. Negotiate to a shared picture of reality, not anecdotes.
BlueCargo was built to solve. The outcome is not just recovered dollars. You now have a budget you can defend and leverage you can use.
Let us Help you Build your 2026 plan
If you want a working session that ends with a clean forecast and a negotiation packet you can take straight to your partners, I am in. We will load your audit data, highlight the biggest controllable leaks, and map the first three fixes that return cash next quarter.
Ready to refine your 2026 budget?
Email me to book a 30 minute session at kawas.aga@bluecargo.com, or text me at 857 498 2622 and I will lock in a time.
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