Glossary / Accessorial

Accessorial

An accessorial is any charge on a load beyond the line-haul rate — detention, lumper fees, tarping, scale tickets, advances, layover and similar — billed for work or delay outside the basic move.

WHO

Who deals with it

Incurred by the driver, communicated to dispatch, billed by accounting.

WHEN

When it shows up

During the move, and then again at invoicing when someone has to remember it.

RISK

What goes wrong

It never makes the invoice. Nobody wrote it down at the time, and by billing day the detail has gone.

A catalogue, not free text
Charges come from a defined catalogue with agreed rates, so the same thing is not billed three different ways by three different people.
Some raise themselves
Detention is derived from stop timestamps and fuel surcharge from the published diesel index, so two of the most commonly missed charges do not depend on being remembered.