Prove Detention or Eat It: GPS Arrival and Departure Times

Driver calls at 11:40. He's been at the receiver since 7:45 for an 8:00 appointment and nobody has touched the trailer. You call the customer and tell them detention started at 10. They pull up the gate log and say he checked in at 10:05, so as far as they're concerned the clock hasn't even started.

Now what. You can eat it and pay the carrier out of your margin, or tell the carrier tough luck and probably never see that truck again. Neither one is great, and arguing louder won't change the gate log. What changes it is having a time written down somewhere that didn't come from the driver and didn't come from the facility.

Where detention money gets lost

Nobody really disputes that the truck waited. Everyone on the call knows it did. The fight is over when the clock started, and most of the time the broker has nothing to point to.

The in and out times on the BOL are blank, or the receiving clerk filled them in, and he's not in a hurry to make his company pay. The gate log shows check-in, which can be an hour after the truck actually pulled into the lot. If the customer says the driver was late, most agreements take detention off the table, and you can't prove he wasn't. And a lot of shippers only pay if they got notice while the truck was sitting there, not in an email on Friday.

So the truck waits, the carrier gets mad, and money nobody can prove just never gets billed.

What gets a detention invoice paid

Customers tend to pay when the invoice answers three questions by itself: when the truck got there compared to the appointment, when it left, and whether somebody told them while it was happening. If those answers come from something other than the driver's say-so, the call usually goes from "we don't show that" to "go ahead and send it over."

Using GPS for the times

If the driver's phone is sharing location on the load, every stop leaves a record. You can see when the truck got to the facility, how long it sat, and when it pulled out. Here's the receiver stop from the call above:

Their gate log says 10:05. The GPS has the truck parked at their address at 7:45 and not moving until 12:30. You're billing two and a half hours instead of arguing about whether there's any detention at all.

It helps that the times get logged as they happen, so nobody is writing them in after the fact. And if the customer goes with "he was late," you can show where the truck was at 7:00 and 7:30 on the way in.

Where GPS falls short

A phone gets you within a few hundred feet. That's plenty to show the truck was at the facility, but it won't tell you which door it was backed into. It also only works if tracking was on, so get it started at dispatch, not after the driver calls you upset. If the phone drops signal you'll see a gap in the report, which is how it should be. You don't want a report that quietly fills in the blanks for you.

And the GPS only proves the times. Whether those hours get paid still comes down to what's on your rate con and in your customer agreement.

Setting it up so it pays

1. Put the detention terms in writing on both sides: free time (two hours is normal), the hourly rate, any cap, and how notice has to be given. The carrier side goes on the rate confirmation. The customer side goes in your agreement or on the tender.
2. Have the driver start tracking when the load is dispatched.
3. When free time runs out, text or email the customer right then with the arrival time.
4. Send the detention invoice the same day, with the trip report and the POD attached.
5. Pass it through to the carrier once you collect. Drivers talk, and they remember which brokers actually pay detention.

Detention isn't the only extra that slips through like this. Our guide to billing accessorial charges goes through the others.

The driver's side of it

A 2018 report from the DOT Inspector General found that every extra 15 minutes a truck sits at a facility raises its expected crash rate by about 6 percent, and that detention costs for-hire drivers somewhere between $1.1 and $1.3 billion a year in lost pay. A driver who lost five hours at a dock is going to try to make it up on the highway.

How HaulEye handles it

We added trip reports to HaulEye, our tracking app, for this exact situation. The driver taps Start Tracking once in the free app, and each stop gets logged on its own: arrival, departure, how long the truck sat, plus a timeline of the whole trip. Open the load, hit Trip report, save it as a PDF and attach it to the invoice.