Terms on the customer
Set each customer's free hours and hourly detention rate on the customer record, once.
Every plan
Detention
Detention is a charge billed to a customer when a truck is held at a pickup or delivery beyond an agreed free period, compensating the carrier for capacity lost while the driver waits.
Also called: detention time, detention pay, waiting time
- Who deals with it
- The driver lives it, dispatch hears about it, and billing has to justify it to a customer who was not there.
- When it shows up
- At any stop that runs long — competing for attention with everything else going wrong that day.
- What usually goes wrong
- It goes unrecorded. By invoice time the arrival and departure times are a memory rather than a record, and the charge is written off.
Detention, explained
Most agreements give the shipper or receiver a set amount of free time — commonly a couple of hours — to load or unload. After that, the clock is billable at an agreed hourly rate. The principle is rarely questioned; what gets questioned is whether it happened, and for how long.
That is the whole problem. Detention is seldom lost because a customer refuses to pay it. It is lost because nobody recorded when the truck arrived and when it left, so a week later there is a recollection on one side and a denial on the other, and the carrier lets it go. It is one of the most reliable leaks in trucking revenue, and it leaks quietly.
How Lanexa handles it
This lives mainly in Billing, where 180 catalogued capabilities are live. Each item says which plan it is on.
Dwell measured, not remembered
Recorded arrival and departure times at each stop are compared with the customer's free hours, and anything over becomes a suggested charge showing the dwell, billable hours, rate and amount.
Start and up
Bill it or dismiss it
One click puts it on the load as a confirmed charge for the next invoice. Dismissing it is permanent, so the same stop is never suggested twice.
Start and up
Agreed before it happens
A quote's charge line can carry its trigger — "after 2 hours free" — and when the quote is accepted, that line is carried onto the load.
Start and up
Questions about Detention
What is detention in trucking?
Detention is a charge billed to a customer when a truck is held at a pickup or delivery beyond an agreed free period, compensating the carrier for capacity lost while the driver waits.
How is detention calculated?
Billable time is the time at the stop minus the agreed free time, multiplied by the agreed hourly rate.
Both the free time and the rate come from your agreement with the customer.
What proof do I need to bill detention?
Recorded arrival and departure times at the stop, plus whatever your agreement names — often in-and-out times signed on the delivery paperwork.
The more that is recorded at the moment, the less the charge depends on anyone's memory.
Does Lanexa pay drivers for waiting time too?
It can. On Start and up, a driver's pay profile can include waiting time, and a settlement run sweeps the driver's dock time along with their loads and trips — the same stop times that feed the detention suggestion.