Freight costs rarely explode all at once. They drift.

One week it’s a few extra detention fees. Next week it’s a surprise reweigh on an LTL lane that “never has issues.” Then a stack of accessorial charges shows up after month-end close, when nobody wants to reopen the file. Multiply that across 200 loads a week and suddenly we’re explaining why transportation spend is 6 to 12 percent over plan even though volumes look flat.

The quiet reasons freight spend keeps creeping up

Our industry loves to blame rates, and yes, linehaul volatility is real. But the most painful spend growth is usually self-inflicted and hard to see because it hides in process gaps.

Here’s what’s typically broken:

• Accessorials are treated like random acts of nature. Detention, layover, TONU, lumper, inside delivery, limited access, chassis per diem, redelivery. Most teams only notice them when AP flags an invoice mismatch. By then, the clock is already run out for disputes.
• The BOL and rate confirmation don’t match reality. Wrong NMFC, bad freight class, missing appointment requirements, incorrect weight, “no stack” not called out, or the shipper forgets to note that it’s a construction site with limited access. The carrier bills what happened, not what we intended.
• Master data decays. A location’s hours changed. A DC started requiring driver check-in via QR code. A consignee moved receiving to a different door. Nobody updates the TMS location profile, so every load repeats the same failure.
• We’re over-indexed on tendering and under-indexed on exception control. Teams spend energy chasing coverage and executing the plan, but they don’t have a tight loop for “what went wrong, why, and what do we change so it doesn’t happen again?”
• Claims and chargebacks are inconsistent. Some loads get disputed aggressively, others slide because the owner is out, the email thread is lost, or the carrier relationship feels too fragile to push.

That’s why it keeps happening: the system is optimized for moving freight, not for learning from freight.

The industry backdrop we’re operating in

A few shifts are making cost drift worse, even for disciplined operators.

• Accessorial pressure is rising. Detention and appointment-related charges have become normalized in many networks. When facilities are tight on labor or dock capacity, carriers monetize the delay. A 1- to 2-hour slip can easily turn into $75 to $150 per hour depending on the contract, and drayage demurrage and per diem can jump quickly when ports or rail ramps congest.
• More stakeholders touch the load. Shipper, 3PL, broker, carrier, dray provider, warehouse, customer. More handoffs means more chances for mismatched expectations between the BOL, the TMS notes, and what the driver experiences.
• Audit complexity is increasing. LTL pricing, DIM, reweighs, and minimum charges are notoriously easy to misapply. Even in FTL, surcharge logic (fuel, California compliance adders, tolls) can be mis-keyed or inconsistently applied across carriers.
• Finance wants answers faster. Many teams are being pushed to shorten the close. When we compress the timeline, we often skip the deeper review and just pay to keep freight moving.

The net of it: if we don’t tighten our feedback loops, we’ll keep paying for the same mistakes, just at higher frequency.

A practical way to stop the bleed without a reorg

We don’t need a six-month “transportation transformation” deck. We need a small operating system for cost control.

Start with three moves.

1) Turn accessorials into a managed workflow

Create a simple rule: every accessorial must have an owner, a reason code, and a prevention action.

• Owner: shipper, warehouse, carrier, customer, or “network constraint.”
• Reason code: appointment missed, incorrect BOL data, no dock capacity, driver check-in delay, site constraints, etc.
• Prevention action: update location notes in TMS, change appointment lead time, add BOL fields, renegotiate free time, pre-clear lumper process, or enforce drop trailer where it makes sense.

If we can’t answer “why did this happen and what do we change,” we’re just paying a tax.

2) Fix the data at the source, not in AP

Most invoice issues are upstream.

• Add required fields to the shipment build: accessorial pre-approvals, pickup number format, consignee restrictions, trailer type, floor-loaded yes/no, pallet exchange rules.
• Validate weight and class before tendering. If we’re doing LTL, don’t accept “class 70 because that’s what we always use.”
• Standardize location profiles. If a DC causes detention twice in a week, the location record should change that week, not next quarter.

3) Build an exception loop that runs weekly

Pick a cadence the ops team can sustain. Weekly beats monthly.

• Review the top 10 accessorial lanes or locations by dollars.
• Review the top 10 carriers by invoice variance.
• Identify repeat root causes and assign a single change per cause.

This is how we convert noise into control.

A quick note on tooling

If you want to accelerate this without adding headcount, tools like Debales.ai can help by flagging invoice anomalies, recurring accessorial patterns, and mismatch trends between rate confirmations, BOLs, and carrier billing. The value isn’t flashy dashboards, it’s getting to the root cause faster and closing the loop while the details are still fresh.

What we can do this week (and actually finish)

Here are practical actions that don’t require a system overhaul.

Audit the last 30 days of accessorials and sort by repeatability

Export all accessorial charges from your TMS or AP system.

• Sort by location and charge type.
• Circle anything that happened 3 or more times.
• For each repeat item, write one prevention step and assign it to a name, not a team.

If you only do one thing, do this. Repeat charges are where the easy money is.

Add two fields to your shipment creation process

Pick the two fields that would have prevented the most spend last month.

Examples:

• “Appointment required” (yes/no) with a required pickup and delivery window
• “Site constraints” (limited access, liftgate, construction, no overnight parking)

Then enforce them. Optional fields stay empty.

Tighten detention discipline at the dock

Detention disputes fail when we can’t prove timestamps.

• Require check-in and check-out times (driver arrival, door time, release time).
• Make it part of the WMS gate process or yard management routine.
• If you’re a 3PL, ask carriers for their macro timestamps and reconcile.

Even a basic timestamp trail reduces “he said, she said,” and it changes behavior when facilities know it’s being tracked.

Clean up the top 20 location profiles

Pick the locations with the most loads or the most accessorials.

• Hours, dock rules, contact names, appointment portals, freight receiving constraints.
• Add notes that a planner will actually read in the TMS.

This is boring work. It’s also one of the highest ROI tasks in transportation ops.

Reconfirm contract language on the top 3 accessorials

Don’t wait for the next carrier dispute.

• What’s the free time for detention?
• What documentation is required?
• Are there caps per event?

If the contract is vague, we’ll pay the invoice as-written by the carrier.

The perspective shift that changes cost control

We tend to treat freight spend as a rate problem. It’s often a learning problem.

When the same accessorial hits us five times, that’s not “carrier behavior.” That’s a signal our process is training the network to bill us.

The teams that win don’t chase every invoice line item. They prevent the next one. And once we start operating that way, freight costs stop drifting and start behaving like something we can actually manage.