Detention and accessorial receivables: getting paid for held time

Freight is unusual in that time itself can be a product you sell. When your truck and driver are stuck at a dock, or your container sits beyond its agreed free time, that waiting is billable. Detention and other accessorial charges are real money you have earned, but they are easy to lose, because unlike the line haul they only get paid if you log the time, invoice it promptly and chase it down.

This guide treats detention and accessorials as what they are: time-based receivables with no real analogue in other sectors. The focus here is getting paid for them. The separate questions of how the rules and free-time clocks work, and how to dispute charges going the other way, are covered in detention versus demurrage explained and disputing demurrage and detention invoices. This is general information for transport operators, not advice.

What counts as a billable accessorial

Accessorials are charges on top of the agreed line-haul rate for work or time beyond the basic move. The most familiar is detention: your driver and equipment held at a shipper or receiver beyond the free loading or unloading window, billed per hour or per day once the clock runs out. Around it sit other accessorials such as layover when a driver is held overnight, redelivery when a stop has to be reattempted, lumper fees for loading or unloading labour, and various wait, reconsignment and stop-off charges.

What they have in common is that they accrue against time and effort you did not originally price into the load. Each is a separate receivable. Treating them as a vague afterthought, rather than discrete line items you are owed, is exactly how the money slips away.

Why so much of it goes unbilled

Time-based receivables are uniquely easy to under-bill. The detention clock starts at a dock with no one watching the meter, the driver is focused on getting unloaded and moving on, and by the time anyone looks at the paperwork the precise in-and-out times are fuzzy. Without a clean record of when the truck arrived, when free time expired and when it was released, you cannot substantiate the charge, and an unsubstantiated accessorial is one the payer will simply decline.

The cost adds up quietly. A couple of hours of unbilled detention here, a missed lumper fee there, repeated across a fleet over a year, is meaningful margin left at customers' docks. Because each charge is individually small, it rarely triggers the urgency that a missing line-haul payment would, which is precisely why it gets neglected.

Logging, invoicing and chasing

The discipline that recovers this money is mostly about records and timing. Log the time at the point it happens: arrival, the moment free time expires, and release, ideally captured by the driver in the moment rather than reconstructed later. Tie each accessorial to the load and to whatever evidence supports it, such as gate or check-in times, so the charge can stand up if questioned.

Then invoice promptly, ideally alongside or right after the line-haul invoice, and itemise each accessorial clearly with the supporting times. Stale, vague detention claims are the easiest for a payer to reject. Finally, chase: accessorials often settle later and more reluctantly than the base rate, so track them as outstanding receivables in their own right and follow up rather than assuming they will trickle in. For US ocean containers in particular there are federal billing and timing rules that affect how and when these charges can be raised; rather than restate them here, see the linked demurrage and detention guides.

Managing the lag until they settle

Even when billed cleanly, accessorials tend to land last in the payment queue. The line haul gets paid; the detention and lumper charges get queried, batched or simply deprioritised by the payer. That lag is part of the wider freight cash-flow gap: you have funded the driver's waiting time and the labour already, and you are waiting to recover it.

So treat accessorial receivables like any other outstanding balance. Know how much is owed across your customers at any moment, keep the evidence handy for the inevitable queries, and do not let the small-ticket nature of each charge lull you into writing them off. Recovered consistently, they are a direct addition to margin on work you have already done.

How Altery fits

Altery does not bill your customers or chase your receivables for you, and it is not a bank. Where it helps is holding and tracking the money once it does come in. Accessorials on cross-border work can arrive in different currencies, so a multi-currency business account that holds USD, EUR and GBP lets you collect them without forced conversions and convert on your own timeline.

Because accessorials settle slowly, you can ring-fence money in a dedicated pot to bridge the lag between funding a driver's waiting time and recovering it, so the wait does not stall the next load. Real-time balances and alerts let you see what has actually landed against what you are still owed, which makes it easier to spot accessorial payments that have quietly not arrived. Multi-entity management keeps separate operating companies' receivables apart, and clean transaction records make reconciling each accessorial against its load straightforward.

This is general information, not financial advice, and Altery is not a bank.

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