Northeast Freight Time one clock, four readings

Accessorials That Hide Time

An accessorial schedule looks like a list of services. A large part of it is time, priced under other names, and recognising which is which changes both what you negotiate and what your data means. For a software-oriented reference on recorded work time and accountability, employee time clock software.

The ones that are really time

Layover. A driver held overnight because the facility could not load or unload within the day. Detention that ran past the 14-hour window and became a day. For broader freight and commercial context, see U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Truck order not used. A vehicle sent and not loaded. The whole visit was waiting, and the outcome was nothing.

Redelivery. A second attempt after a failed first. Frequently the first attempt failed because the wait exceeded available hours.

Driver assist and lumper waiting. Time attributed to a service rather than to a delay.

Stop-off charges, partially. Each additional stop carries its own dwell, and the charge blends the routing cost with the waiting cost.

And after-hours or weekend delivery. Sometimes a genuine premium for unsociable hours; sometimes the only way to get a slot at a facility with a queue, which makes it a dwell charge in disguise.

Why the naming matters

It hides where the money goes. A receiver reviewing spend sees detention, layover, TONU and redelivery as four unrelated categories. Aggregated, they are one number about one problem — and that number is usually much larger than the detention line alone.

It distorts the diagnosis. Detention invoices are frequently rejected while layover, on the same underlying cause, is usually paid without argument. So the visible detention figure understates the problem by however much has been reclassified.

And it makes benchmarking meaningless. Two carriers with identical operations report very different detention totals depending on how their accessorial schedules are drawn.

The one exercise worth doing

Add them up by cause, not by name.

Take a quarter. Sum detention, layover, TONU, redelivery and driver-assist waiting, per facility. That total is what dwell at that facility cost you in charges.

Then add the pricing premium and the uncovered loads, which do not appear on any invoice at all.

Most people doing this for the first time find the total is three to five times the detention line they had been arguing about. It changes which conversation is worth having.

What to negotiate at renewal

Define layover's trigger, because it is the most expensive and the vaguest. Does it begin when the window closes, when the facility says come back tomorrow, or when the driver books a room? These are hours apart and hundreds of dollars.

Define TONU precisely. Arrived and not loaded within what period, with what notice, evidenced how. A vague TONU clause is either never paid or always disputed.

Cap the stack. Detention converting into layover converting into redelivery on a single load can exceed the linehaul. A per-load cap is a reasonable ask and gives the paying side a worst case to budget against.

And require the underlying timestamps for any time-based accessorial, not just for detention. The same six elements apply to all of them, and applying them only to detention is why detention gets scrutiny and layover does not.

For carriers

Do not use accessorials to recover what detention should have covered. It works in the short run and it obscures your own data — you will not be able to tell which lanes are actually expensive.

Bill each cause under its own name, with its own evidence. It is harder and it produces a record you can act on at renewal.

And track them together internally even when billing them separately, so your lane pricing reflects the true cost rather than the collectable part.

The short version