Automated detention billing
Detention billing that doesn’t depend on anyone remembering.
DwellWatch reads the ELD you already run, catches each hold past free time as it happens, tells the brokers you pick while the truck is still there, and hands you an invoice that is already built.
No card. 14-day trial after that.
What “automated” actually means here
Three things happen without anybody doing them, and the middle one is the one that decides whether a claim gets paid.
- 1
It watches
Vehicle positions are polled from your ELD and matched against the customer sites you have confirmed. A hold past that broker’s free time becomes a detention event on its own. Nothing to install, nothing for a driver to open, no behaviour change.
- 2
It tells the broker while the truck is still there
Most agreements require the carrier to advise at or before the charge is incurred, and treat failure to do so as forfeiting the right to collect. That notice cannot be reconstructed afterwards, which is why sending it on time is the part worth automating.
- 3
It builds the claim
Gate times, the telemetry behind them, the terms that applied and the arithmetic, assembled into an evidence packet and a drafted invoice — ready for a person to check and send from your own billing address.
Two things it will never do
Email a customer you haven’t approved. Broker notices are off until you switch them on, one bill-to party at a time. A notice states a fact — arrival time, when free time ran out — never a demand or an amount, and you get a copy when it is queued with a window to stop it.
Send an invoice on its own. A human approves every one before it reaches a broker. We have no load data, so we cannot tell “waiting to unload” from “parked by arrangement” — and that judgement is yours, not a model’s.
What it connects to
Motive, Samsara, Geotab and 32 more, including the portals that run on them under another brand — telecoms, dealers and truck manufacturers all resell these. The connection is read-only and takes about two minutes: we can see where your trucks have been and nothing else. We never write to your logs.
No driver names, no driver IDs, no HOS logs, no dashcam. That is enforced in code by an allow-list rather than a policy: nothing reaches storage unless it is named.
Search for your portal by nameWhat it costs
$30 per truck per month, $99 minimum. Enterprise features are $249 a month at any fleet size, plus a one-time $2,500 setup. A 14-day free trial, and a free 30-day audit before any card is entered.
Per truck, never per seat. Flat, and never a share of what you recover — that line is deliberate, and it is what keeps this software rather than debt collection.
Where automation doesn’t help
Worth saying before you spend time on a trial, because it is cheaper for both of us to find out now.
- Short-dwell local freight. If your stops are twenty minutes and your trucks are home every night, you are not losing hours to detention and no amount of software will find any.
- Rate confirmations with no detention terms. If the clause isn’t there, there is nothing to bill against and automating the paperwork just produces denials faster. That is a negotiation fix, not a software one.
- Drop-and-hook and dedicated lanes. Detention is genuinely rare when nobody waits for a door.
- One to three trucks. The $99 floor means you would pay several times the per-truck rate, and at that size the month-to-month variance is worse than the price.
The free audit is the cheapest way to find out which of these you are. It measures what detention actually cost your fleet over the last 30 days — a rate of loss, not a cheque, since a look-back was never notified and most of it is already out of reach.
Before you decide
Estimate what detention costs your fleet in a year
Estimate what detention costs your fleet in a year, from truck count, stop volume, how often stops run long, and your rate. It will tell you when the answer is too small to be worth solving.
What Documentation Do You Need to Get Detention Paid?
Five documents make a detention claim, and four can be rebuilt after the fact. Here’s what brokers accept, what gets denied, and the piece you can’t recover.
Can ELD Data Be Used as Proof of Detention?
ELD data proves your truck was there. It doesn’t prove the driver was checked in and ready to load. Here’s where it wins detention claims and where it fails.
Find out what it costs you before you decide anything.
Connect your ELD and get a free 30-day audit of every hold past free time, at every customer site, measured from your own telemetry. No card, nothing for your drivers to do.
Start my free audit