You Sat Six Hours. What Did You Bill For It?
What a detention stop owes you, what cancelled loads add, and how much of it never reaches your account — split into the part you never invoiced and the part they never paid. Free, no signup.
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- Owed vs collected
/ Owed vs collected /
Never reaches you, per year
$11,154of $20,280 owed
A month, owed
$1,690
- Collected 45%
- Never billed 40%
- Billed, unpaid 15%
Most of what you lose is never billed. That is a documentation fix, not a collections one.
- Billable hours, this stop
- 4.0 hrs
- This stop owes
- $240
- Detention, monthly
- $1,440
- TONU, monthly
- $250
- Collected, annual
- $9,126
Nothing here is sent anywhere — it runs in your browser.
How the detention calculation works
The same six steps the calculator runs, worked through on its default inputs, so every line can be checked against the panel above. Change an input and it repeats them on yours.
- Billable hours6 hrs on site − 2 hrs free, under the 8 hrs cap4 hrs
- One stop owes4 hrs × $60/hr$240
- A month, owed$240 × 6 stops + 1 cancelled load × $250$1,690
- Invoiced$1,690 × 60% documented and billed — the other $676 was never invoiced$1,014
- Collected$1,014 × 75% paid — the other $253.50 was billed and refused$760.50
- A year$20,280 owed − $9,126 collected$11,154 never reaches you
What the number cannot tell you
- It prices one typical stop, repeated. If your waits swing between an hour and a day, run it once for an ordinary week and once for a bad one instead of averaging in your head.
- Rate confirmations differ on when the clock starts. Some count from the appointment time rather than from when you pulled in, so arriving early earns nothing, and some void the claim if you arrived late. Enter the hours your con would pay for, not the hours you waited.
- Some brokers pay only detention that was reported while it was happening — before free time ran out, or within a set window. A claim that first appears on the invoice can be refused however well the times are documented.
- An overnight delay may be billed as layover rather than detention, at a different rate. This tool prices detention and TONU only, so keep layover out of the hours if your con separates them.
- The 60% invoiced and 75% paid defaults are placeholders, not industry figures. Replace them with what the last few months of your own settlements show.
What to keep for every claim
- The rate confirmation, with its detention, TONU and layover terms: free time, hourly rate, cap, and any notice requirement.
- The appointment time, plus your arrival and departure times written on the bill of lading and signed at the dock. ELD or GPS timestamps are useful backup when the paper times are disputed.
- The message that told the broker detention had started, with its timestamp.
- For a TONU, the dispatch confirmation and the cancellation message: proof the truck was committed before the load fell through.
- The detention invoice itself, sent with the load's paperwork rather than weeks later, while the times are still easy to check.
About detention and TONU.
Because they are different problems with different fixes. Money you never invoiced is a paperwork problem — nobody wrote down the in and out times, so there was nothing to bill. Money you billed and did not collect is a negotiation or a credit problem. Carriers usually assume they have the second one and actually have the first, which is good news: it is the cheaper of the two to fix.
Documented arrival and departure times, on the bill of lading or a signed in/out log, matched to what the rate confirmation says about free time and hourly rate. A dispatcher noting the times as they happen is the whole system — reconstructing them from memory a week later is what turns owed money into a discussion you lose.
Then you have no contractual claim for that load, and the number this tool shows is what the silence cost you rather than what you can invoice today. That is worth knowing before the next one: detention and TONU terms are negotiable up front and nearly impossible to add afterwards.
You were dispatched, you committed the truck, and the load was cancelled before you could haul it. The rate is whatever the confirmation says it is — and if it says nothing, this figure is an argument for asking rather than an invoice you can send.
Yes, and that is a deliberate simplification: it scales the stop you described across the month you described. Real months are lumpier. It is meant as an order of magnitude — if the annual number is large enough to change what you do about documentation, it has done its job.
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