The accessorials drayage brokerages forget to bill

An unbilled accessorial is never a mystery at the moment it happens. The driver waited three hours and said so. The chassis was out for six days and the pool will say so. The warehouse charged for palletising and emailed an invoice the same afternoon. Every one of those facts was known, by somebody, on the day.

What goes wrong is structural, and it is the same failure every time: the charge is captured somewhere that the invoice does not read from. It lives in an email thread, a remarks box, a note on a dispatch sheet. Then the invoice gets built from the rate — because the rate is the field the invoice knows about — and everything else is silent.

The fix is not discipline. It is making the charge the record and the invoice a view over it. If a charge exists on the load, it is billed to somebody or it is explicitly written off by a named person. There is no third state where it simply does not appear.

Here is what to be capturing.

The charges, one at a time

Line haul and FSC

The line haul is the move, and it is the one charge that never goes missing. The fuel surcharge is more interesting: either a percentage of line haul or a per-mile figure indexed to a published diesel index and reset weekly. Whichever basis you use belongs in the rate agreement, because an FSC you cannot explain from a published number is an FSC your customer will dispute and win. It runs both ways, too — your carrier's rate is either fuel-inclusive or it is not, and the difference is margin.

Chassis

Daily rental for the chassis under the box, from a pool or a leasing company, running from outgate to termination and counting weekends. Three ways it leaks:

• Days accrued while the container sat at the consignee, which nobody attributes to the chassis because they are thinking about the container.
• Chassis splits at ports where the chassis is not picked up at the same location as the box, and flips, where the container has to be moved onto a different chassis.
• Carrier-provided chassis on a rate that was quoted assuming pool equipment.

Storage

Two different charges wearing one word. Terminal storage is assessed by the marine terminal for the box occupying its ground, and at some ports it is separate from — and additional to — the ocean carrier's demurrage. Warehouse storage is per pallet per day or week at your facility or a third party's. Bill-to is usually the customer, but not always: a warehouse that refused a delivery or mis-scheduled an appointment can properly be billed for what its mistake cost.

Drayage and its extras

The port or rail leg itself, plus everything the port makes you do: pre-pulls, dry runs, hazmat, overweight and triaxle, congestion and night gate fees. A pre-pull in particular is an accessorial people forget is billable — you pulled the box early specifically to beat the last free day, which was work performed for the customer's benefit and at the customer's request or in the customer's interest.

Transloading

Moving cargo out of the ocean container into domestic trailers, or the reverse. Charged per container, per pallet or per hour, and frequently including re-palletising and wrap. It leaks because it gets arranged by phone at short notice — the box was heavier than the lane allows, or the consignee cannot take a 40-foot container — and last-minute arrangements are the ones nobody writes down.

Dunnage and top chain

Dunnage is the material and labour that secures the load: airbags, straps, load bars, blocking and bracing lumber, corner boards, shrink wrap. Top chain is the additional chains and binders certain loads and certain terminals require, and the time to apply them.

Neither is large individually. Both are almost never billed, for the same reason: the driver or the warehouse buys the materials, the cost lands in a supply account, and nothing connects it back to the container it was used on. Capture them anyway — a charge type you never record is a charge type you never price into a rate either.

OTR charges

The long-haul leg that follows the drayage, and everything attached to it: line haul beyond the local radius, layover, truck ordered not used, driver assist, lumpers, stop-offs, redelivery.

This is where the two-carrier case lives. One container, one load, a drayage carrier on the front and an OTR carrier on the back — two costs and one or more revenue lines, all on the same record. If your system can only hold one carrier rate per load, that second leg is being tracked somewhere else, and somewhere else is where charges go to die.

Warehouse

Handling in and out, per-pallet receiving, cross-dock fees, palletising, labelling, inventory. Same shape as storage: usually a pass-through, occasionally a charge back to the warehouse that caused it.

Detention and per diem — different charges, one word

In a trucking rate confirmation, detention means the driver and truck held at a facility beyond the free window, usually one or two hours, billed hourly and often capped. The evidence is in and out timestamps: gate receipts, the ELD trail, geofence dwell.

On a steamship line invoice, "detention" frequently means something else entirely — holding the container outside the terminal past its free days, which a trucker would call per diem. Same word, different party, different clock, different tariff.

Decide which definition your own rate agreements use and use it consistently, because the ambiguity is where pass-through fails. Detention is inherently two-sided: the carrier bills you and you bill your customer, and if the second half does not happen you have simply paid for your customer's slow receiving dock.

Per diem, meanwhile, runs until the empty is ingated and receipted — not until the driver drops it — and it runs concurrently with the chassis rental on the same days.

Other

Escorts, permits, scale and reweigh, tarps, washouts, pier pass and clean truck fees, container inspections, and customs exam charges — which are large, common, and absorbed constantly.

Treat "Other" as a diagnostic. Every entry in it is a charge type you have not named yet. Review the bucket monthly and promote whatever keeps recurring into a real type, because a named charge gets priced, quoted and remembered, and an "Other" does not.

Bill-to belongs on the charge

The reason a load can carry charges billed to several different parties is that the parties are not all customers.

• Customer — the default, and most charges.
• Carrier — a chargeback. Damage, a claim deduction, a lumper that was already in their rate, a fee on a fuel advance, a penalty for a missed appointment. It reduces what you pay them; it is not revenue from the customer.
• Warehouse — where the warehouse caused the cost. They lost a pallet, refused a delivery, or mis-booked an appointment and you paid the detention.
• Sales agent — rare, and useful precisely because it is uncomfortable. A concession given to win or keep an account, charged against the agent's commission, is a give that stays visible instead of quietly dissolving into gross margin.
• Other — a co-broker, a consignee who pays certain charges directly, or a third-party payer named on the delivery order.

Each of those becomes a line on a different document: the customer's invoice, a deduction on the carrier's bill, a debit note to the warehouse. That is why the bill-to party belongs on the charge itself rather than being decided later at invoicing time. Decided later, it becomes one person's recollection of a phone call from three weeks ago.

The discipline that makes it work

Three rules, and they are unglamorous.

Capture the charge when the event happens, not when the supplier's invoice arrives. The person who knows the driver waited three hours is the dispatcher, on the day. The person reading the carrier's invoice four weeks later cannot verify it and will pay it.

Attach the evidence. Gate timestamps, the pool statement, the warehouse invoice, the exam notice. Every accessorial you bill gets questioned eventually, and the ones you can prove are the ones you keep.

Make writing off a charge a deliberate act with a name on it. Absorbing an accessorial to protect an account is a legitimate commercial decision. Absorbing it because nobody noticed is not a decision at all — and the difference between the two only exists if the charge was recorded in the first place.