What actually happens on a load
Detention gets lost in a handful of specific places, and they're the same places every time. Here's each one, and how it gets closed, from the rate con landing in your inbox to the money landing in your account.
The rate con gets read
Free time, detention rate, hourly cap, the notification window, and who has to be told and how. Every broker writes it differently and it's buried in the fine print of a PDF. Those terms get pulled off automatically, per load, before dispatch.
A geofence goes up at both stops
The pickup and delivery addresses become geofences in your own ELD account. Tight ones, on purpose: a lazy fence around a big DC can't tell the guard shack from the dock door, and that gap is 45 minutes of argument you'll lose.
The free-time clock starts at arrival
Arrival and departure come straight off the truck. No app for the driver to remember, no dispatcher watching a spreadsheet. By the time free time expires, the clock has already been running against a timestamp you can prove.
The broker gets notice inside the window
This is the step that kills most claims. A rate con may give you 30 minutes after free time to put the broker on notice, and a claim that misses it is dead no matter how long the truck sat. Notice goes out on time with the GPS attached, and your driver gets a text: get the in and out times signed on the BOL.
The evidence packet gets assembled
Location history, duty status logs, the signed BOL, the rate con terms, and the math: hours times rate, capped where the contract caps it. Two independent sources putting your truck in the same place at the same time is hard to wave off.
The claim gets chased until it's answered
The supplemental invoice goes out once you approve it, then it gets aged and followed up so it doesn't quietly sit in a broker's queue forever. You see what got flagged, what got filed, what got paid, and what got denied and why.
What the system handles
- Detention terms parsed off every rate con
- Arrival and departure captured from your ELD
- Broker notice sent inside the contractual window
- Driver texted to get in and out times signed
- Evidence packet built on every event
- Claims aged and followed up until answered
Three things stay yours, on purpose.
Automating the watching and the paperwork is the point. Automating your judgment is not.
You approve every claim
Nothing goes out with your company's name on it until you've looked at it. This isn't a robot emailing your brokers behind your back.
You take the rare dispute call
When a broker wants to argue, that's still a human conversation. The difference is you're holding a packet instead of trying to remember a Tuesday from six weeks ago.
You decide who's worth fighting
Some brokers pay detention without much fuss. Some never will, and you may have reasons for keeping them anyway. That call is yours, load by load.
It runs on the ELD you're already paying for.
Nothing new goes in the truck. No second device, no app for your drivers, no partnership to negotiate. You generate an API token inside your own Motive, Samsara, Geotab dashboard, and you can revoke it any time, in one click, without calling me.
If you run a budget ELD without a real API, this won't work yet. Worth asking me about early, so neither of us wastes a month finding out.
What gets pulled from your ELD account
- Geofences created per load from the rate con addresses
- Arrival and departure events pushed in real time
- GPS location history and trip records for the claim
- Hours-of-service duty logs as a second, independent source
- Driver-photographed BOLs pulled from the ELD documents
- Text messages to the driver the moment detention starts
What I won't oversell you.
You've heard enough pitches. Here are the three things I'd want to know before letting anyone near my claims.
Geofence precision
At a big distribution center the guard shack and the dock door can be 45 minutes apart. Tight fences plus duty logs close most of that gap, but where it's genuinely ambiguous the claim gets written honestly rather than optimistically. Padded claims are how a carrier gets a reputation.
Broker portals
Brokers who take claims by email are fully automatable. The big portals, CHR and TQL and TriumphPay, get a finished packet handed to you and about two minutes of uploading, for now.
Detention first, then the rest
Layovers, TONU, extra stops, driver assist, and lumper reimbursements all run the same detect-document-invoice-chase loop, and they're the natural next step. But one thing gets done properly before anything else gets added.
Does that match how it goes at your fleet?
Genuinely asking. 15 minutes, and if I have a step wrong I'd rather hear it from you now than find out on your loads.