There is a category of revenue that requires no selling, no new customers and no rate increase: the accessorials you already earned and never billed. Detention, layover, truck ordered not used, lumper fees, driver assist, redelivery, storage.

The scale is not small. The American Transportation Research Institute puts the annual cost of driver detention to the trucking industry at roughly $15.1 billion — about $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity. Drivers reported being detained in 39.3% of all stops, accumulating between 117 and 209 detention hours a year. Detention typically bills at $50 to $100 per hour after a two-hour free window.

Some of that is genuinely unbillable. A great deal of it is billable and simply never gets billed, because the evidence needed to support the charge lives in a text message, a driver's phone call, or a dispatcher's memory.

Why accessorials leak

Accessorial billing fails at the evidence step, not the entitlement step.

To bill detention you need arrival time, departure time, and something authoritative establishing both. That information exists at the moment it happens — a driver calls dispatch, sends a text, or the facility signs something. Then the day continues, the load delivers, and three weeks later somebody in billing is trying to reconstruct whether a truck sat for four hours in Fort Worth.

By then the reconstruction cost exceeds the charge, so the charge is dropped. Multiply by volume.

• Detention — Evidence required: Arrival and departure times · Where it usually lives: Driver text, phone call · Why it leaks: Never entered anywhere structured
• TONU — Evidence required: Cancellation time, dispatch record · Where it usually lives: Email thread · Why it leaks: Not linked to the load
• Lumper — Evidence required: Receipt · Where it usually lives: Photo on a phone · Why it leaks: Arrives after invoicing
• Layover — Evidence required: Overnight authorization · Where it usually lives: Verbal approval · Why it leaks: No written trail
• Driver assist — Evidence required: Facility confirmation · Where it usually lives: Nowhere · Why it leaks: Disputed by default
• Redelivery — Evidence required: Failed attempt record · Where it usually lives: Carrier notification · Why it leaks: Not connected to billing

Every row has the same shape. The event was known in real time by somebody, and that knowledge never became a structured record attached to the load.

How do you stop losing accessorial revenue?

You stop the leak by capturing the accessorial event at the moment it occurs — timestamping arrival and departure from the communications already happening and attaching the evidence to the load record — instead of reconstructing it at invoicing when the cost of proof exceeds the charge.

The important reframe: this is not a billing problem, it is a capture problem. Billing teams are not failing. They are being handed incomplete files and doing the rational thing with them.

The capture points that matter:

1. Arrival and departure. Whether it comes from a check call, a driver message, a tracking event or a facility confirmation, the timestamps need to land on the load record automatically. This is the single highest-value capture, because detention is the largest category.
2. Authorization moments. When a customer approves a layover or a redelivery, that approval is usually verbal or buried in an email reply. Capturing it as a linked record is what makes the charge defensible later.
3. Receipts and documents. A lumper receipt photographed at the dock should attach to the load immediately, not arrive in accounting after the invoice went out.
4. The exception itself. A detention event crossing the free window should generate a notification while the truck is still sitting — which is also when it is still preventable.

That fourth point is where capture and prevention converge, and it is the more valuable half.

Billing it is second best. Preventing it is better.

Detention is billable revenue for a carrier and a cost for everyone else. For a broker it is mostly a pass-through headache: the carrier bills you, you try to bill the customer, and the difference plus the argument is your loss.

The larger opportunity is that most detention is a communication failure with a dollar sign attached. The dock ran behind and nobody told the driver. The appointment was booked for a window that stopped being realistic four hours earlier. The paperwork was not ready.

An agent monitoring live ETA against booked appointments catches the mismatch before the driver arrives to sit — which is why appointment scheduling and detention are the same problem viewed from two ends. The prevention side pays better than the billing side, and it improves the carrier relationship instead of straining it, which matters when capacity is scarce and carriers are choosing brokers.

The dispute half

Captured evidence changes what happens when a charge is challenged.

Today, an accessorial dispute is often settled by whoever has more patience, because neither side can produce a clean record. With timestamps, linked authorizations and attached receipts, the conversation shifts from argument to reference — and the charges that were being written off as unprovable become collectible.

This is the same mechanism that shortens detention conversations with customers generally: the dispute is not really about whether the truck sat, it is about whether anyone can demonstrate it.

It also compounds into working capital. Accessorials that arrive as post-invoice adjustments extend days sales outstanding and generate rebills; accessorials captured before invoicing go out on the original invoice and get paid on the original terms. That connection to DSO and working capital is usually the version of this argument a CFO finds most persuasive.

What to measure

• Accessorial capture rate: accessorial events detected versus accessorial events billed. Most teams have never computed this and find the gap uncomfortable.
• Detention hours by facility: the diagnostic that identifies which consignees are systematically costing you, which is a commercial conversation worth having.
• Post-invoice adjustment rate: how often accessorials arrive too late for the original invoice.
• Dispute win rate: the direct measure of whether your evidence is good enough.

Frequently asked questions

How much detention is actually billable? It depends on contract terms and the free-time window, typically two hours. The relevant question is not what percentage is billable in theory but what percentage of billable detention you currently capture — that gap is the recoverable amount.

Does chasing accessorials damage customer relationships? Inconsistent chasing does. Billing some detention and not other detention, with no evident logic, reads as arbitrary. Consistent, well-evidenced billing is a normal commercial practice and is easier to defend than sporadic billing.

What is the typical detention rate? Industry reporting for 2025-2026 puts truck detention at roughly $50 to $100 per hour after a two-hour free window, varying by equipment type and contract.

Where should capture start if we can only do one thing? Arrival and departure timestamps. Detention is the largest category by value, and the timestamps are the evidence that unlocks it.

The bottom line

Detention alone is a $15.1 billion annual cost, drivers are detained in 39.3% of stops, and the charges go unbilled because the evidence never became a record.

Capture the timestamp when it happens rather than reconstructing it at invoicing, attach authorizations and receipts to the load in real time, and use the same live ETA monitoring to prevent the detention you would otherwise be arguing about.

Debales deploys AI agents for freight quoting, order processing, ETA updates, and multi-channel customer communication — timestamping accessorial events from live carrier communications and attaching the evidence before the invoice goes out. Book a demo.