Questions, answered plainly

It is what one unit of material actually costs you once everything attached to getting it to site is counted: the rate on the line, any discount, freight, insurance and handling, divided by the quantity in one stated unit. Rateslip leads with the figure excluding GST and shows the GST-inclusive figure next to it, each tagged with its basis so the two are never mixed up.

It is recorded as unpriced, not as nil. On most purchase orders that line means the buyer is arranging transport, which is a cost you are carrying rather than a cost that vanished. It stays visible in the comparison instead of quietly improving the number, and it is never filled with a freight figure taken from another document.

Put each on its freight basis first. A quotation delivered to your site with freight folded into the rate, and one that adds freight as a separate line, both reach your site, so their landed costs per unit compare once the separate freight is added in. A quotation ex-works, or with freight left to you, does not include getting the goods to you, so Rateslip labels it as excluding your freight and will not rank it against a delivered one. Freight written as "extra" or "at actuals" has no figure, and Rateslip leaves it unpriced rather than guessing one.

When they differ on any of six keys, or either side leaves one unknown: the product family, the thickness, the variant, the commercial stage, the delivery destination, matched by its PIN code, and the reader, meaning the model, the version of its reading instructions and the version of the arithmetic that produced each figure. Both documents must also stand on the same freight basis, tax basis and unit, with a landed figure on each side. Two unknowns are not treated as a match. Every check that fails is named, not only the first, because knowing why a comparison is invalid is more useful than a number that looks authoritative and is not.

Yes, but as a deliberate link rather than a guess. A quotation and an invoice are different commercial stages, so they are never ranked against each other. When the invoice prints the quotation's number, Rateslip shows what you were quoted and what you were billed per unit, landed, and which part of the price moved, provided the item, site and supplier match, the invoice falls inside the quotation's printed validity, and both were read by the same reader: the same model, prompt version and arithmetic. Linking the two by hand, when the invoice prints no reference, is not built yet.

Upload both. When they are the same order from the same supplier and compare on every key, Rateslip sets the landed cost per unit side by side and takes it apart: material, discount, freight and insurance per unit on each version, and the change in each. A rate that rises while freight falls by the same amount shows as exactly that, with no change in landed cost. The pages rarely say which version came first, so they are called version A and version B.

Because they disagree more often than people expect. Across the real supplier documents this was built from, the hidden text contradicted the printed page on about 19% of them — roughly one in five — in ways that change the price. The usual cause is a corrected table pasted over an old one as an image. The page looks right. The old row is still underneath, still adding up on its own terms, so nothing flags it. Reading the page as printed avoids that entirely, and the text layer is kept as a cross-check.

No. The model reads values off the page and nothing else. Every calculation runs in code on exact values, rounded only when shown, and each document is reconciled against its own printed totals before any per-unit figure is produced. If the document does not agree with itself, that is reported rather than absorbed.

A PDF of up to six pages, or photographs or scans of up to six pages as JPEG, PNG or WebP, each file up to 20 MB. Rateslip reads each page as an image, so a scanned PDF with no text inside it, or a photograph, is read the same way as any other. Spreadsheets and Word files are not read: print them to PDF first.

Today, yes, and narrower than that: it recognises two families of building material, wall panels, priced per square metre, and boards, priced per square foot. Any other line is still read and shown, with the reason it has no landed cost per unit, rather than a guessed one. Bundled quotations that price labour and installation with the material are out of scope for now.

Only the account that uploaded them. Storage is private, access is enforced at the database level rather than in application code, and nothing you upload is used to train a model. More detail is in the privacy notice.

Nothing at the moment. Rateslip is in early access and pricing has not been set. If that changes you will be told before it applies to you.