Your customers are
getting smarter about
what they're paying you.
You should know what your billing system is doing before they do. Synterminal serves distributors and suppliers from three directions simultaneously — your own buy-side invoice exposure from upstream manufacturers, your sell-side billing compliance before your customers document it for litigation, and competitive pricing intelligence in a market where algorithmic pricing is under active federal antitrust scrutiny.
You are a supplier to your contractors. You are also a buyer from your manufacturers, importers, and commodity traders. Every electrical supply house, HVAC distributor, plumbing supply, and building materials company has its own upstream supplier invoices — arriving daily, processed by an AP team that is managing volume, not reading every line against every purchase order.
At distribution margins — typically 2% to 5% operating — a 2% overcharge from an upstream manufacturer is not an accounting rounding error. It is the profit margin on nearly two million dollars in sales, gone before anyone noticed it was missing.
A food distributor with 950 invoices per month and a 3.2% operating margin loses €31,500 annually from avoidable supplier billing errors alone — equal to the profit on €1.9 million in sales. That's one supplier category. Most distributors buy from fifteen to fifty upstream vendors. The errors compound. The margin doesn't recover itself.
The legal theory is straightforward and it is spreading fast: when companies using the same pricing software produce correlated pricing behavior that systematically harms buyers, that coordination — even without explicit agreement — can constitute an antitrust violation under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The software is the hub. The suppliers are the spokes. The buyers are the plaintiffs.
RealPage — apartment rental pricing software. Settled with DOJ May 2026. Rouse Analytics — construction equipment rental pricing platform. MDL 3152 consolidated in federal court August 2025. United Rentals, Sunbelt, Herc, H&E Equipment all named. Ace Hardware and Epicor Software — hardware distributor pricing class action filed May 2026 in the Northern District of Illinois. The pattern is identical in every case: a shared pricing platform, correlated price behavior across competitors, buyers who paid more than they should have.
An electrical supply house running Eclipse or Epicor for catalog pricing. An HVAC distributor using a shared benchmarking service to set regional rates. A plumbing supply operating on a manufacturer-suggested price list shared across the distribution network. None of these companies believe they're doing anything wrong. RealPage didn't either.
California AB 325, effective January 1, 2026, amended the Cartwright Act to explicitly prohibit common pricing algorithms used in coordinated restraint of trade, with heightened civil and criminal penalties. Arnold & Porter, June 2026. The Third Circuit allowed an algorithmic pricing class action to proceed July 29, 2026. The law is moving in one direction.
Your contractor customers are increasingly sophisticated. They have invoice forensics tools, commodity intelligence services, and in some cases — Synterminal — running their invoices against market benchmarks before they pay them. The information asymmetry that defined supplier-contractor relationships for decades is narrowing. The distributor who understands their own pricing relative to the market is the one who can defend it in a renegotiation — and the one who can identify where they're genuinely uncompetitive before losing an account.
This is not an audit. It is intelligence. The same pipeline that builds a price index from a contractor's invoice history can build one from yours — looking outward at the commodity markets your materials trace to, at what comparable distributors in your category are winning and losing, and at where your pricing is creating vulnerability in your account relationships.
The indices below are publicly available, timestamped, and independently verifiable. When a contractor brings an invoice forensics engagement to Synterminal, these are the benchmarks we use to score whether your pricing moved with market conditions or independently of them.
Sources: COMEX, LME, BLS Producer Price Index via FRED, NYMEX, EPA. All publicly available. All timestamped. All independently verifiable. The same sources Synterminal uses on the buy side of every engagement.
Synterminal has real engagement data on what distributors actually charge versus what they quote. We have commodity index correlation built into the pipeline. We have SKU substitution detection running at the description-similarity level. We have price trajectory analysis per SKU per supplier per period. When a distributor brings us their own billing data and asks "what will a contractor's forensics engagement find in our invoices," we can answer that question with document-anchored findings.
No competitor at the mid-market level is offering this proactively. The Big Four do billing compliance work for defendants in active litigation — after the complaint is filed, at enterprise scale, at enterprise cost. Synterminal does it before the complaint is filed, for the distributor who wants to know what's in their billing system before their customers — or a plaintiffs' class action firm — finds it first.
Three doors. One engagement. The same infrastructure. A different vantage point. Tell us which door applies to your situation. We scope it same day.
One conversation.
Distributors, supply houses, manufacturers who sell direct. Describe your situation — which door or all three. Fixed scope. Document-anchored findings. No percentage of recovery. Every finding ties to a source document.
ugly problem.
Direct intake for difficult information problems. Physical markets, procurement, pricing, supply chain, entity resolution, litigation support. Describe the problem. We scope the engagement.