Detention is the tax we keep paying for being out of sync.

Most of us can point to the same pattern: the driver arrives on time, checks in, sits 90 minutes, and then we argue about whose fault it is. The carrier sends an invoice with detention fees and a few extra accessorial charges. We push back, they escalate, and someone spends an hour digging through emails, gate logs, and a blurry POD photo. Nobody wins, and next week it happens again.

The handoff is where things break

Detention isn’t just a dock problem. It’s a handoff problem.

The yard-to-dock handoff touches too many systems and too many humans:

• A rate confirmation promised a pickup window that didn’t reflect warehouse reality.
• The appointment was booked in a portal that doesn’t talk to our TMS.
• The WMS says the load is staged, but it’s staged in the wrong zone or missing pallets.
• The driver’s ETA in the carrier app differs from the ELD ping, and neither matches what our team believes.

So we run on assumptions. And assumptions are expensive.

Here’s why it keeps happening in our industry:

• We schedule to averages, not variability. A dock that “usually” turns an FTL in 60 minutes still has bad days when labor is thin, inbound is lumpy, or a cross-dock wave hits late.
• Our time stamps aren’t credible. If check-in is a clipboard time and dock-in is someone’s memory, we can’t defend ourselves when a detention claim lands.
• We’re measuring the wrong thing. Many teams track on-time pickup, but not time-to-door, time-on-dock, or time-to-release. The fees come from those gaps.

The result is predictable: we pay detention, and then we normalize it as a cost of doing business.

The numbers are moving the wrong direction

Carriers aren’t making detention up. They’re tightening enforcement because their own economics are tighter.

Industry surveys have repeatedly shown detention is widespread, with a meaningful share of drivers losing multiple hours per week waiting at shipper and receiver facilities. When a driver loses 2 hours at a facility, that’s often 100 to 150 miles of capacity gone for the day. Multiply that across a fleet and you can see why carriers push harder on detention and why they bake more buffer into linehaul rates.

At the same time, shipper expectations haven’t gotten easier:

• More appointment-driven facilities.
• More SKU complexity and split-case picking.
• More last-minute changes when customers pull demand forward or delay it.
• More regional volatility in labor availability.

Accessorial charges are also getting more granular. It’s no longer just detention. We’re seeing more charges around layover, TONU, sorting, driver assist, and re-delivery. Even in LTL, reclass and accessorial disputes can eat hours of admin time per week.

If we’re honest, the biggest trend isn’t just higher fees. It’s more friction. More disputes. More time spent proving what happened instead of improving what happens.

A practical path forward that doesn’t require a miracle

We don’t fix detention with a motivational speech. We fix it with tighter process, better time stamps, and fewer surprises.

1) Create a single source of truth for arrival and dock events

Pick 4 to 6 events and standardize them across facilities:

• Appointment scheduled
• Driver arrived (gate-in)
• Checked-in
• Door assigned
• Load/unload complete
• Gate-out

Then make the time stamps defensible. Gate-in can come from yard management, guard shack scans, or geofence pings. Door assigned can come from a YMS or dock scheduler. Gate-out can come from the same source as gate-in. The point is consistency.

When the carrier disputes detention, you shouldn’t be searching inboxes. You should be pulling a clean event trail.

2) Stop booking appointments without operational capacity

If our dock can handle 6 live loads per hour with current labor, don’t schedule 9 and hope for the best. That’s not optimism, it’s debt.

A simple weekly capacity rule helps: set an hourly throughput target per door by load type (drop, live, floor load, palletized, hazmat). Then cap appointment slots accordingly. If sales or customer service wants more volume, they can see the tradeoff in black and white.

3) Build a triage lane for “not ready” freight

A big chunk of detention comes from freight that isn’t actually ready:

• Missing labels
• Incomplete pick
• Shorted inventory
• QA hold
• Pallets not wrapped

Give the dock team a fast escalation path: a dedicated staging lane plus a WMS exception workflow. The goal is to keep the driver moving, even if it means swapping doors, shifting to a drop trailer, or re-sequencing loads.

4) Treat detention like a root-cause KPI, not a line item

Track detention at the facility and customer level with three views:

• Dollars paid
• Hours waited
• Primary root cause (late appointment, labor shortage, freight not ready, carrier late, paperwork)

If you do this for 30 days, patterns show up fast. One receiver might be costing you $12,000 a month because their appointment windows are fantasy. One shift might be consistently under-staffed. One lane might have chronic late arrivals due to drayage handoffs at the port.

Once you can name the cause, you can negotiate, redesign, or enforce.

Tools can help, but only if they match the workflow

Most of us already have a TMS, a WMS, and an ERP. The gap is the connective tissue: clean event data, exception handling, and dispute-ready documentation. Tools like Debales.ai can help teams pull together shipment events and paperwork faster, so detention and accessorial disputes don’t consume half a day of someone’s week.

What you can do this week

If you want results without a six-month project, do these five things in the next five business days.

1) Audit last month’s detention invoices in two hours

Pull the top 20 by dollars. For each one, write down:

• Facility
• Carrier
• Customer
• Stated reason
• Whether you have credible time stamps

You’ll find your biggest leak fast.

2) Standardize your detention rules on rate confirmations

Make sure the rate confirmation clearly states:

• Free time (for example, 2 hours)
• Detention rate (per hour) and when it starts
• Required documentation (gate-in/out, signed BOL time stamps)

Ambiguity is a donation.

3) Add a “door-ready” checkpoint 60 minutes before appointment

Have the floor confirm in the WMS that the load is staged, wrapped, and paperwork-ready. If it fails, escalate immediately and adjust the plan before the driver arrives.

4) Put a stopwatch on your dock for one shift

Don’t rely on what we think happens. Measure one shift and capture actual averages:

• Time from arrival to door
• Time at door
• Time from completion to exit

Even a simple shared spreadsheet beats tribal knowledge.

5) Call one carrier and ask what they see

Pick a core carrier and ask a blunt question: “Where do we waste your drivers’ time?” You’ll get feedback we can’t see from inside the four walls.

Detention isn’t inevitable. It’s a symptom.

When our operation is synchronized, detention fades into the background. When it’s not, detention is the bill collector showing up right on time. The challenge for all of us is to stop treating that bill as normal and start treating it as proof that the handoff needs redesign.