Accessorials used to be an annoying line item. Now they’re a second freight bill.

If you run a 3PL desk, manage transportation for a shipper, or live in the middle as a broker, you’ve felt it: detention pops up where it never used to, liftgate fees appear on “standard” LTL moves, a dray carrier invoices storage because the terminal appointment got pushed, and suddenly your lane rate means nothing. We can negotiate base rates all day, but the budget gets wrecked in the margins.

The part nobody wants to admit

The root issue isn’t that carriers are getting greedy. It’s that our processes are still built for a world where execution was stable and exceptions were rare.

Most accessorials are born in the gap between what was planned and what actually happened:

• A rate confirmation says 8:00 to 10:00, the receiver works a different schedule, and the driver sits for 3 hours.
• The BOL lists 8 pallets, but the dock sees 10 and re-weigh or reclass hits the invoice.
• An LTL shipment gets delivered to a limited access location that wasn’t flagged in the order, so you get the surprise fee.
• A warehouse misses a pickup window, the carrier reschedules, and you pay a dry run or truck ordered not used.

And why does it keep happening? Because we’re still relying on manual handoffs and “tribal knowledge” to catch exceptions.

Dispatch knows which receivers are slow. The warehouse supervisor knows which SKU builds unstable pallets. The customer service rep knows which consignee always requires an appointment. None of that consistently makes it into the TMS, the WMS notes, or the load tender in a structured way. So we repeat the same mistakes, then argue about the invoice afterward.

What the data is telling us right now

Our industry has shifted into a higher-friction operating environment. More volatility means more exceptions, and exceptions create accessorials.

A few trends are driving this:

• Appointment density is up. Many DCs now run tighter windows and stricter check-in rules, which makes late arrivals more expensive. When a facility enforces a 30-minute grace period, a single upstream delay can become detention.
• Labor variability isn’t gone. Even when headcount stabilizes, cross-dock and receiving throughput still swings by shift and day. That unpredictability shows up as dwell time.
• Parcel-like expectations are bleeding into freight. Shippers want tighter ETAs and fewer “we’ll update you” calls, but the underlying data quality (addresses, access requirements, pallet counts) often hasn’t caught up.
• Invoice scrutiny is rising. When margins are thin, carriers and 3PLs both audit harder. That means more charges get found, not fewer.

The money adds up faster than most teams think. On a typical FTL, 2 hours of detention at $75 to $100 per hour is a 3 to 6 percent hit on a $1,500 linehaul. Stack a TONU ($250 to $400), a layover ($300 to $500), or dray storage (often $150+ per day depending on port and chassis rules) and you can wipe out the profit on a load that looked healthy at tender.

A practical path forward that doesn’t rely on heroics

We don’t fix accessorials by yelling at carriers or telling dispatch to “watch it closer.” We fix them by tightening the chain from order to execution to invoicing.

1) Treat accessorials like a process KPI, not a finance cleanup

Most teams review accessorials after the month closes. That’s too late. Track them weekly by category and root cause:

• Detention (shipper vs receiver)
• TONU and reschedules
• Lumper
• Reclass and reweigh
• Limited access, liftgate, inside delivery
• Dray storage and chassis-related charges

When you can say “Detention at Receiver X is 38 percent of our accessorial spend this month,” you have something operational to fix, not just a bill to dispute.

2) Standardize what must be true before a load tenders

This is where the biggest gains happen, and it’s not glamorous.

Before tender, require these fields to be complete and validated:

• Confirmed appointment requirement and booking status
• Accurate pallet count and weight
• Access requirements (liftgate, dock height, limited access, inside delivery)
• Correct ship-from and ship-to addresses including suite, gate codes, and receiving hours
• Reference numbers that receivers actually use

The goal is simple: fewer “we’ll figure it out” loads.

3) Make detention predictable, not mysterious

Detention is usually a math problem plus proof.

• Use geofencing check-in and check-out when possible.
• Capture arrival, door time, and release time, even if it’s manual.
• Set expectations in the rate confirmation: free time, detention rate, and documentation required.

Then do the uncomfortable part: hold our own facilities accountable too. If our warehouse is the slow node, blaming carriers just trains everyone to stop cooperating.

4) Close the loop between execution and master data

If a consignee is always limited access, bake it into the customer master. If a receiver always requires appointments, make that a default rule in the TMS. If a certain lane regularly causes reweigh, update packaging specs or change the carrier service.

This is where lightweight automation helps. Tools like Debales.ai can pull unstructured notes from emails and documents and turn them into consistent load requirements, so we stop losing critical details between sales, ops, and billing.

What we can do this week (no big system project required)

Here are moves that actually fit into a busy ops week.

Run a 30-minute accessorial standup

Pick your top 20 accessorial charges from the last two weeks. For each one, answer:

• What was the charge category?
• What was the preventable cause?
• What is the one process change that would stop the next one?

You’ll be surprised how quickly patterns show up.

Build a receiver and shipper “watch list”

Create a shared list (even a spreadsheet) with the top 10 facilities driving detention or reschedules. Add:

• Average dwell time
• Best arrival window
• Appointment rules
• Who to call when stuck

Then instruct dispatch and customer service to treat those like high-risk nodes. This alone can cut repeat detention because teams stop acting surprised.

Tighten your rate confirmation language

If your rate con is vague, disputes get loud. Update it to include:

• Free time and detention start time (for example, 2 hours free after scheduled appointment)
• Required proof (in/out times, signed BOL, ELD location)
• TONU terms (what counts as cancellation, required notice)

Clear terms don’t stop accessorials, but they stop chaos.

Audit LTL accessorial flags on 25 recent shipments

Take a sample and check:

• Did we mark liftgate correctly?
• Did we flag limited access?
• Was the NMFC/class correct?
• Did the BOL match what actually shipped?

If 10 to 20 percent are wrong, that’s not an “ops mistake.” That’s a process design problem.

Put one metric on the wall: accessorials per load

Not total dollars. Per load. It normalizes the noise and makes improvements visible. If you’re at $38 per load and you can get to $28, that’s real money at scale without moving a single base rate.

The shift that matters

Accessorial charges aren’t random. They’re feedback.

They’re the invoice version of what our operation couldn’t absorb: bad master data, unclear appointments, inconsistent packaging, missing requirements, and slow handoffs between systems and people. When we treat accessorials as a blame game, we keep paying tuition. When we treat them as a process signal, we start buying back margin in the most controllable place we have: execution discipline.