Most freight budgets don’t blow up because linehaul rates spike. They blow up in the fine print.

A clean rate confirmation comes back, the load delivers, everyone moves on, and then the invoice shows up with detention, layover, TONU, lumper, reclass, redelivery, chassis, storage, or a “customer caused delay” note that nobody can prove or disprove. We’ve all seen the same movie: the accessorial is small enough to avoid a fight, but big enough to quietly torch the month.

The ugly truth about why accessorials keep showing up

Accessorials keep happening because our processes were built for booking freight, not validating exceptions.

Here’s what’s typically broken:

• Documentation is scattered. The POD is in one place, check-in and check-out times are in a driver text thread, and the detention policy is in a carrier packet from 2021.
• The clock starts differently depending on who you ask. Warehouse says the driver arrived early. Carrier says appointment time passed. Broker says “two hours free” but can’t show where it’s written.
• Proof is optional until money is on the table. By the time AP sees the invoice, the people who remember what happened are already on different shifts or different accounts.
• We treat accessorials as a finance problem instead of an operations signal. Every detention bill is really telling us where the process is failing: check-in, door assignment, staging, paperwork, or appointment planning.

And the cycle repeats because the feedback loop is too slow. If it takes 30 days to discover we’re paying detention at a specific DC every week, we’ve already paid it four more times.

What the industry data is telling us right now

Accessorial exposure is rising even when base rates soften. When capacity loosens, carriers compete on linehaul but protect margin through enforcement: tighter documentation rules, stricter appointment compliance, and quicker billing on exceptions.

A few shifts are driving the trend:

• Detention is no longer “nice to have” revenue. Many fleets now treat it as a standard part of yield management. Industry benchmarks commonly price detention at $75 to $125 per hour after free time, and some lanes are higher.
• Dwell is not improving everywhere. Port and rail fluidity has gotten better than peak crisis years, but drayage is still a minefield: chassis availability, terminal appointment windows, and cutoffs turn small delays into storage and per diem fast.
• More shippers are auditing harder, which pushes the burden of proof downstream. If a shipper won’t accept a detention charge without geofenced timestamps and a signed in-out log, the broker and carrier end up fighting about whose proof counts.
• E-commerce and smaller drops add complexity. More stops means more chances for limited receiving hours, liftgate needs, inside delivery, and “we didn’t know it was a residential address” surprises.

One practical way to think about it: if our average detention incident is $175, and it happens on just 6 percent of loads, that’s $10.50 per load in hidden cost. On 1,000 loads a month, that’s $10,500 we didn’t plan for. That’s a headcount. That’s a WMS integration. That’s real money.

We don’t need perfection, we need a tighter exception loop

The path forward isn’t “fight every invoice.” That burns relationships and time. The win is preventing repeatable accessorials and resolving legitimate ones in days, not weeks.

Start with three operational moves:

1) Standardize what counts as proof Make it boring and consistent. For detention, decide what you’ll accept: arrival timestamp, check-in confirmation, door assignment time, paperwork ready time, departure timestamp. If you can’t get all five, pick the minimum viable set and enforce it.

2) Build the accessorial playbook into the load, not the invoice Before tender:

• Confirm receiving hours, appointment rules, and free time.
• Validate equipment requirements (reefer, hazmat, liftgate, pallet jack, driver assist).
• For drayage, confirm last free day, per diem terms, and terminal appointment constraints.

After tender:

• Capture arrival and departure times at shipper and receiver.
• Require lumper receipts same-day.
• Store photos when packaging or count disputes are common.

3) Run a weekly accessorial standup Thirty minutes. Same attendees: ops, AP, customer service, and someone from the warehouse side if you can get them. Review the top 10 accessorials by dollars and the top 10 by frequency. Assign one owner per root cause. If we don’t assign an owner, it’s just complaining.

If you want to speed this up, tools like Debales.ai can help pull rate confirmations, invoices, PODs, and email threads into one workflow so exceptions get validated faster and patterns show up sooner.

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

Here are actions that actually fit into a busy freight desk:

• Create a one-page detention policy sheet and send it to every carrier you book this week. Include free time, required proof, billing window, and where to submit documents. You’ll reduce arguments simply by removing ambiguity.
• Add two fields to your load notes in the TMS: “appt type and free time” and “receiver check-in process.” If the planner can’t fill them, that’s a signal the load is under-defined.
• Pick one problem receiver and call them. Ask: What causes the dwell? Is it early arrivals stacking up? Is it paperwork? Is it staging? You don’t need a relationship reset, you need one operational change like scheduled drop windows or pre-advised ASN details.
• Audit 20 recent accessorial invoices and categorize them. Detention, lumper, reclass, redelivery, TONU, other. You’ll usually find 1 to 2 categories making up 70 to 80 percent of the pain. Fix those first.
• Tighten appointment discipline: stop booking FTL appointments with a two-hour cushion “just in case.” That “just in case” becomes two trucks arriving at once, and then we pay detention on both.
• For LTL, validate accessorials at quote time: limited access, residential, liftgate, inside. If it’s not on the quote, it will show up on the invoice.

The mindset shift that changes the numbers

Accessorials aren’t random. They’re the invoice version of operational truth.

When we treat them like annoying one-offs, we keep paying tuition to learn the same lesson. When we treat them like a quality metric, we start fixing the process: clearer appointments, cleaner paperwork, faster turns, and fewer surprises. The goal isn’t to eliminate accessorials. The goal is to stop being surprised by the ones we could’ve prevented.