Detention is one of the few costs in freight that feels personal. Not because it’s the biggest line item on paper, but because everyone knows how avoidable most of it is. A driver waits two hours for a door, the facility swears the truck was late, the broker forwards a blurry POD, and three weeks later someone in accounting pays the invoice just to make it go away.

And somehow we repeat it.

Why we keep paying fees we didn’t agree to

Most detention and accessorial disputes aren’t really about the fee. They’re about proof. Specifically, the lack of clean, consistent event data across systems.

Here’s what usually happens in the real world:

• The appointment time lives in the shipper portal.
• The check-in time is scribbled on a guard sheet or captured in a YMS that doesn’t talk to anyone.
• The carrier’s arrival time comes from ELD, but it’s geofence-based and doesn’t match the facility’s definition of “arrived.”
• The BOL and rate confirmation have detention terms, but nobody can find the right version when the invoice hits.
• The lumper receipt is a photo in someone’s email.

So when the accessorial invoice arrives, we’re arguing from memory. That’s not a negotiation, it’s a coin flip.

Even worse, our teams are incentivized to move on. A $175 detention charge might take 45 minutes to research, plus emails, plus a call. If our loaded labor rate is $40 to $60 per hour, the math quietly pushes us toward paying and moving on. Multiply that by dozens of loads a week, and it becomes a budget leak that looks like “normal operations.”

The industry context: fees are rising, and tolerance is dropping

Accessorials are not a rounding error anymore. Many networks are seeing accessorial-heavy invoices increase as capacity tightens and facilities run lean. Detention and layover show up more often when warehouses are understaffed, appointments are overbooked, or inbound schedules swing wildly from forecast misses.

A few shifts are making this worse across our industry:

• Facilities are running closer to the edge. When a DC is short 10 to 15 percent of needed labor on a shift, dock turns slow down fast.
• Appointment compliance is stricter, but definitions vary. Some sites treat “arrived” as gate check-in, others as docked, others as when paperwork is accepted.
• Carriers are less willing to eat time. With driver utilization under pressure, more carriers are billing detention at the first eligible minute and documenting it aggressively.
• Paperwork is still fragmented. Even in 2026, plenty of operations still rely on emailed PDFs, portal screenshots, and driver text messages to validate events.

The net effect is predictable: more invoices, more disputes, longer payment cycles, and strained relationships between shippers, brokers, 3PLs, and carriers.

You can’t manage what you can’t prove

The fix isn’t “work harder” or “train people to check emails faster.” The fix is building a repeatable chain of custody for load events and documents.

A practical path forward looks like this:

1) Standardize your event definitions Pick definitions that your operation can actually enforce:

• Arrival: geofence entry within X miles plus a driver check-in confirmation
• Check-in: guard/YMS timestamp
• Docked: door assignment timestamp
• Released: signed paperwork timestamp

If your facilities can’t capture docked and released reliably, don’t pretend they can. Start with arrival and check-in, then mature.

2) Tie detention eligibility to data, not arguments Detention should be calculated from a single ruleset that references:

• Appointment time (from TMS or shipper portal)
• Free time (from rate confirmation or carrier contract)
• Verified timestamps (arrival and check-in at minimum)

When those three don’t align, the load should be flagged automatically, not discovered during invoice review.

3) Centralize documents where ops can find them Rate confirmations, BOLs, lumper receipts, PODs, and check-in sheets should be linked to the load record in the TMS, even if the source system is email or a portal. If it takes more than 60 seconds to pull the rate confirmation terms during a dispute, you don’t have a process, you have tribal knowledge.

4) Build a dispute playbook that’s fair and fast Carriers hate slow disputes as much as we do. Set a simple SLA:

• Acknowledge accessorial invoice within 24 hours
• Approve or dispute within 5 business days
• If disputed, request specific evidence (timestamps, facility logs, signed paperwork)

The key is consistency. If we dispute everything, we’re noise. If we dispute nothing, we’re a target.

One tool note: teams using Debales.ai often cut the time spent hunting through emails and PDFs by pulling load documents and exceptions into one workflow, which helps resolve detention and accessorials without a week of back-and-forth.

What we can do this week (no big IT project)

If you’re running a busy operation, you don’t need a six-month transformation to stop the bleeding. You need a tighter loop on the 20 percent of loads causing 80 percent of the fees.

1) Run a 30-day accessorial audit

Pull the last month of detention, layover, lumper, TONU, and redelivery charges. Sort by:

• Facility
• Carrier
• Lane
• Time of day/shift

You’re looking for patterns. One customer DC generating 35 percent of detention is a process problem, not “the market.”

2) Create a “proof packet” template

For every disputed accessorial, we should be able to assemble the same packet in 10 minutes:

• Rate confirmation with detention terms highlighted
• Appointment record
• Carrier arrival evidence (ELD check-in message or geofence)
• Facility check-in timestamp (guard log, YMS)
• Any notes from dispatch, driver, or warehouse

If we can’t build this packet, we shouldn’t be surprised we lose disputes.

3) Fix the top two facilities first

Pick the two locations generating the most detention. Do a quick ops huddle with warehouse leadership:

• Are appointment slots realistic for actual door capacity?
• Are drop and hook loads prioritized correctly?
• Is there a choke point at guard check-in or paperwork?
• Are we releasing drivers in batches instead of continuously?

A small change like adding one dedicated check-in person during peak inbound can cut wait time dramatically. In many DCs, shaving even 20 minutes off average turn time moves you below common free-time thresholds.

4) Stop accepting vague accessorial invoices

Accessorial billing should include:

• Location
• Date/time in and out
• Reason code (detention, layover, lumper)
• Supporting doc (receipt, facility note, signed paperwork)

If it doesn’t, reject it and request the missing fields. Not angrily. Just consistently.

5) Add an exception flag in the daily load review

During your morning load review, ask one question: which loads yesterday had risk signals?

• Late appointment reschedules
• Live unload at a historically slow facility
• Driver check-in but no dock assignment after 60 minutes

Those loads should be prepped for accessorial prevention before the invoice exists. That’s where the leverage is.

The perspective shift that changes the game

Detention isn’t a fee problem. It’s a visibility and accountability problem.

When our timestamps are fuzzy, we pay for other people’s bottlenecks. When our documentation is scattered, we reward whoever argues loudest. But when we can prove what happened on a load, the conversation changes from blame to fixes: staffing, appointment design, drop strategies, and carrier alignment.

In our industry, the teams that win aren’t the ones who dispute the most. They’re the ones who make detention harder to bill in the first place.