Detention pay is one of those line items everybody agrees should exist and almost nobody collects cleanly. The driver knows he sat three hours at a distribution center. The dispatcher knows it too, because the check call came in at 6:40 and the driver didn’t get loaded until almost 10. But when the invoice goes out, the detention line gets challenged, discounted, or quietly dropped because nobody can prove the clock. ...
Most carriers and brokers can tell you their revenue per load. Fewer can tell you, without pulling three systems and a spreadsheet, how many days actually pass between delivery and cash landing in the bank. That gap is where the money leaks. Not in some dramatic fraud sense — in a hundred small delays, each one shaving margin off a load that already ran thin. This is the plain version of freight invoicing and settlement: what happens after the truck backs out of the dock, who touches the paperwork, and where the process breaks on a normal week, not just a bad one. ...