Your old invoices are a claim on cash.
The $100B tariff unwind is sending refunds to importers of record. But much of that money was passed downstream to you, one surcharge line at a time. Clawback reads your paid AP history, finds the tariff dollars you covered, and builds the evidence to get them back.
| Machined housings, 4,200 units | $463,000 |
| Freight and handling | $8,400 |
| Tariff surcharge, Section 301, 10% | $46,300 |
| Expedite fee | $1,250 |
| TOTAL PAID, 12 Dec 2025 | $518,950 |
Paid a year ago. Closed in the ERP. Now worth $46,300.
The refunds are flowing to the wrong end of the supply chain.
When tariffs were struck down, the government began returning duties to the companies that paid them at the border: the importers of record. But across B2B supply chains, importers rarely absorbed the whole cost. They pushed it downstream through surcharges, duty line items, and contract price riders. Distributors billed manufacturers. Manufacturers ate it or passed it on again.
So the government to importer refund is only step one. Step two is a private reconciliation exercise worth billions: figuring out which refunded dollars actually belong farther down the chain. The evidence is not a customs filing. It is an invoice that was paid a year ago and closed in the ERP. No finance team is staffed to reread a year of AP history line by line. That is why the money sits unclaimed.
This market has a clock on it.
Refund cash is landing this quarter. FedEx alone is disbursing $800M to shippers and customers starting this month. Every dollar that reaches an importer before its downstream customers assert a claim gets absorbed into earnings, and recovering it later means a fight instead of a reconciliation.
That gives this product a forcing function most B2B software never gets: a 12 to 18 month window where CFOs have a named, quantified pile of money to chase, and the side that shows up with invoice level evidence first wins. The buyer is the CFO, the pitch is found working capital, and the pricing writes itself: a contingency share of recovered dollars, so there is no budget fight and no risk to the customer.
Detection is AI. Dollars are deterministic.
Clawback turns a closed AP transaction into a live receivable in four moves. The model reads documents and proposes links. It never computes the claim: the math over confirmed links is plain arithmetic, so every dollar is auditable and defensible in a dispute.
Ingest
Pull paid invoices from the ERP, plus contracts, POs, and supplier email. No system migration: read only exports and connectors.
Detect
Classify every line item: an explicit tariff surcharge, a contract duty clause pass through, or no claim. Each call carries a confidence score.
Assemble
Link each claimable dollar to its evidence chain: the invoice line, the contract clause, and the upstream refund event. An analyst confirms.
Recover
Export the evidence package and demand letter, then track each claim from demand to cash. Clawback is paid a share of what comes back.
One pipeline from paid invoice to recovered cash.
The whole system runs on Vercel: Functions for ingestion and orchestration, Blob for raw documents, Claude through AI Gateway for extraction, Neon Postgres for the lineage graph, and Queues to run the pipeline durably at AP scale.
The AI boundary
The model only extracts and classifies. It reads surcharge language, matches contract clauses, and proposes links with confidence scores. Low confidence routes to review, never silently into a claim.
The human gate
An analyst confirms proposed links before any dollar enters a claim. This is what makes the output usable in a commercial dispute instead of a model guess with a logo on it.
The moat
The lineage graph is the asset: every dollar tied to a clause and a refund event. Tariffs are the first use. Freight, fuel, and fee pass throughs run on the same rails later.
Watch detection run over a real looking AP slice.
Twelve paid invoices from five suppliers, the way they actually look: explicit surcharges, quiet contract riders, fuel surcharges that are not tariffs, and general price increases that claim nothing. Run detection, then open a claim to see the three part evidence package.
| Invoice | Supplier | Date | Line item detail | Amount | Classification | Claimable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INV2417 | Meridian Components | 14 Nov 2025 | Machined housings, 4,200 units. Tariff surcharge separately stated at 10%. | $509,300 | Queued | |
| INV2492 | Meridian Components | 09 Dec 2025 | Control boards. Line 4 reads tariff surcharge, Section 301. | $309,650 | Queued | |
| INV2560 | Meridian Components | 22 Jan 2026 | Sensor assemblies. Duty recovery line billed at cost. | $350,900 | Queued | |
| INV8811 | Vantage Industrial Supply | 02 Oct 2025 | Fasteners and fittings. Temporary price adjustment tied to MSA duty clause. | $184,000 | Queued | |
| INV8902 | Vantage Industrial Supply | 18 Dec 2025 | Hydraulic seals. Price rider references duties actually incurred. | $127,500 | Queued | |
| INV3308 | Cordell Metals | 27 Oct 2025 | Aluminum extrusions. Import duty surcharge itemized. | $98,200 | Queued | |
| INV3371 | Cordell Metals | 05 Feb 2026 | Sheet stock. General price increase, no duty language. | $121,400 | Queued | |
| INV5106 | Northfield Packaging | 11 Nov 2025 | Corrugated cartons. Domestic sourcing, no import exposure. | $46,800 | Queued | |
| INV5187 | Northfield Packaging | 20 Jan 2026 | Stretch film. Standard annual repricing. | $33,150 | Queued | |
| INV7742 | TriState Freight | 30 Sep 2025 | Linehaul services. Fuel surcharge, not a duty pass through. | $58,900 | Queued | |
| INV7801 | TriState Freight | 15 Dec 2025 | Drayage and detention. No tariff linkage found. | $41,200 | Queued | |
| INV2601 | Meridian Components | 19 Feb 2026 | Spare parts kit. Surcharge line removed after tariff unwind. | $87,400 | Queued |
How this becomes a company.
The concierge pilot
Take one manufacturer's AP export and run the pipeline with analysts in the loop end to end. Success is one recovered check. That check is the whole pitch deck.
The recovery engine
Productize ingestion and detection, keep review human, sign customers on contingency. The tariff window does the demand generation. Target: mid market importers and manufacturers with $50M+ in exposed spend.
The pass through ledger
Tag pass through costs at transaction time so the next reversal, audit, or dispute resolves automatically. Recovery is the wedge. The lineage layer is the durable business.