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.
In plain terms.
Most contracts give a shipper or receiver a couple of hours to load or unload. After that, the clock is billable. The rate and the free period are agreed in advance, so detention is rarely disputed in principle — what gets disputed is whether it happened, and for how long.
That is the whole problem. Detention is almost never lost because the customer refuses to pay it. It is lost because nobody recorded when the truck actually arrived and left, so a week later there is a recollection on one side and a denial on the other, and the carrier drops it rather than argue. It is one of the most reliable revenue leaks in trucking, and it leaks quietly.
Who deals with it
The driver experiences 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, which means it competes for attention with whatever else is going wrong that day.
What goes wrong
It goes unrecorded. By the time the invoice is raised, the arrival and departure times are a memory rather than a record, and the charge is quietly written off.
How Lanexa handles it.
This lives in Billing, where 46 capabilities are live.