Detention fees are one of the few costs in freight that feel personal. Not because the dollars are mysterious, but because everyone can picture the waste: a driver trapped at a dock, our team refreshing tracking screens, and a customer asking why the appointment was missed when the trailer was literally on-site.

The uncomfortable truth is that most detention isn’t caused by one bad actor. It’s caused by a handoff that fails in small, predictable ways. We keep trying to “manage drivers harder” when what we actually need is to manage the moments between systems, teams, and facilities.

Detention keeps happening because our handoffs are brittle

Detention is rarely a single event. It’s a chain reaction:

• The appointment was booked off an old PO or outdated ASN.
• The BOL doesn’t match what the WMS expects, so receiving puts the load in a penalty box.
• The driver arrives early (because we begged for on-time), but the facility only works strict windows.
• The lumper wasn’t scheduled, or the payment method wasn’t approved, so unloading pauses.
• The drop lot is full, yard checks are manual, and nobody can find the trailer.

We then do what our industry always does under pressure: we add more calls, more emails, more “just checking in” messages. That creates noise, not flow.

What’s broken isn’t that carriers ask for detention. What’s broken is that we don’t control the prerequisites to unload. We treat appointment setting, paperwork quality, and dock readiness as separate tasks owned by different people. Detention lives in the gaps.

The numbers are pushing in the wrong direction

Across logistics, we’re seeing the same shift: pricing pressure on linehaul and rising scrutiny on accessorials. When spot rates soften, disputes get sharper. Carriers and brokers can’t make margin on the linehaul, so they enforce detention rules more strictly. Shippers, on the other hand, push back harder because budgets are tight.

A few trends are making this worse:

• Tighter facility labor: Warehouses run leaner, and the first thing that slips is dock velocity.
• More complex freight profiles: Mixed SKU pallets, retail compliance, and floor-loaded imports all extend unload time.
• More “connected” tools that still don’t connect: We have a TMS, a WMS, an ERP, a yard system, and a dock scheduler. Yet the same load can have four different versions of the truth.

In many networks, a single hour of delay doesn’t just cost detention. It creates missed re-deliveries, rescheduled drayage, extra storage, and customer penalties. If your average detention charge is $75-$150 per hour after free time, it doesn’t take many events to turn into a quiet six-figure annual leak.

The path forward: engineer the unload like a production line

If we want fewer accessorials, we have to stop treating detention as a carrier performance problem and start treating it like a process defect.

Here’s what works in the real world.

Start by making “ready to unload” a measurable standard

Most facilities can tell you their dock schedule. Few can tell you whether a load is actually ready to receive.

Define a simple checklist that must be true before the truck hits the gate:

• Appointment confirmed with the correct reference numbers (PO, ASN, inbound ID)
• BOL and packing list match the WMS expectations (ship-from, ship-to, item count, pallet count)
• Lumpers scheduled (or documented as not required)
• Payment method pre-approved (Comchek, EFS, direct billing)
• Special handling flagged (floor load, temp, hazmat, liftgate, inside delivery)

Then track it. Not in a post-mortem. In a live queue.

When we’ve implemented this discipline, the biggest change isn’t technology. It’s that the team stops “hoping it works out” and starts catching the missing pieces while there’s still time to fix them.

Build a detention scoreboard that doesn’t lie

Detention debates get emotional because everyone has partial data. The carrier has arrival and departure times. The warehouse has a dock log. The broker has emails. Nobody has a clean narrative.

Create a single detention record per event with:

• Gate-in time (from geofence or check-in)
• Dock-in time (from yard/dock system or manual scan)
• Start unload time (first touch)
• Completion time
• Reason code controlled by the facility (not the carrier)

Then roll it up weekly:

• Detention hours by facility
• Detention hours by customer account
• Percent of loads exceeding free time
• Top 5 reason codes

Even a basic scoreboard cuts disputes because it makes the argument about patterns, not anecdotes.

Fix the two most common root causes first

In most networks, 80% of detention comes from two buckets:

1) Appointment and paperwork mismatches 2) Dock capacity and labor variability

For the first, tighten the upstream controls:

• Require BOLs and ASNs at least 12-24 hours pre-arrival for live unload facilities
• Standardize reference numbers on rate confirmations and tender notes
• Reject incomplete tenders early instead of letting them roll into exceptions

For the second, stop pretending every day is the same:

• Set variable appointment capacity by shift staffing, not by optimism
• Protect a small number of flex slots for late inbound arrivals
• Use drop-and-hook where it truly reduces dock congestion, not as a blanket policy

If you’re thinking “we already do some of this,” that’s normal. The difference is consistency. Detention lives where standards are optional.

A quick tool note, because nobody has time for more swivel-chair work

If you’re tired of stitching together emails, PODs, BOLs, and detention invoices to figure out what actually happened, tools like Debales.ai can help teams validate documents and standardize exception workflows without adding another manual review step.

What we can do this week (without a big project)

Here are moves that don’t require a new TMS or a six-month implementation.

1) Add two fields to every tender and rate confirmation

• Facility free time policy (hours and start point)
• Detention documentation requirements (check-in method, timestamps accepted)

This alone reduces arguments because expectations are explicit before the truck rolls.

2) Run a 30-minute detention standup with the warehouse

Bring last week’s top 10 detention events and ask two questions:

• Which ones were preventable?
• Which ones are recurring?

If the warehouse team only hears about detention when someone is angry, nothing changes. When they see patterns, they start suggesting fixes.

3) Create a “paperwork ready” SLA for your own team

Pick a threshold and enforce it:

• 95% of inbound loads have correct BOL and references 12 hours before appointment

If we can’t hit that, the warehouse can’t either.

4) Tighten arrival communication to one clear channel

Too many check-ins create confusion. Choose one:

• EDI 214 updates, or
• A tracking link tied to the load in the TMS, or
• A carrier portal update

Then train everyone to trust it. The goal is fewer messages and more certainty.

5) Stop auto-approving detention just to clear the inbox

It feels efficient, but it teaches the network that detention is guaranteed revenue.

Instead:

• Auto-approve when timestamps are clean and the reason code is facility-driven
• Auto-dispute when documentation is incomplete
• Escalate only the gray cases

You’ll see behavior change in 2-4 weeks, especially with repeat carriers and repeat facilities.

The real win isn’t saving money, it’s buying back reliability

Detention is what happens when we ask a network to run on precision but manage it with guesswork. When the handoff is solid, everything else gets easier: fewer accessorial surprises, fewer angry calls, fewer missed appointments, and better carrier compliance because drivers stop expecting to lose half a day at our docks.

If we want to be taken seriously as operators, we can’t treat detention as the cost of doing business. It’s a signal. The question is whether we use it to assign blame, or to engineer a better system.