What Documentation Do You Need to Get Detention Paid?

A complete detention claim is five things: a rate confirmation naming the terms, a bill of lading with in and out times, a written notice sent while the truck was still sitting, supporting facility records, and telematics data backing all of it up.

Four of those can be reconstructed after delivery. One can’t. If you were denied and you’re trying to work out what went wrong, start with the notice, because that’s the piece that doesn’t exist retroactively and it’s the second most common reason claims get rejected.

The complete claim packet

The ordering matters. Carriers tend to assume the ELD record is the strongest evidence because it’s the most objective. Brokers treat it as supporting, and treat a clerk’s handwritten time on a bill of lading as primary, even though the clerk was guessing and the ELD wasn’t.

It isn’t a blanket refusal of electronic evidence, though. Campbell Soup’s schedule requires a statement of record showing check-in and check-out times, and accepts either an EDI 214 status message or an annotated signed BOL depending on the facility. What shippers want is a record of a status someone asserted, not a record of where a vehicle was.

The notice is the only piece you can’t rebuild

Broker-carrier agreements commonly require the carrier to advise the broker at or before incurring detention or other accessorial charges, and treat failure to do so as forfeiting the right to collect. Knight-Swift’s published agreement says precisely that.

So the standard isn’t a set number of minutes’ warning. It’s simpler and harder: tell them before the clock starts. One agreement permits the notice verbally provided it’s confirmed in writing within 24 hours, which matters if your driver already raised it at the facility.

A notice that works contains three things: the load reference number, the exact check-in time, and the current status at the facility. Email, SMS, or a message in the broker’s portal all work, as long as it’s written and timestamped. Something in this shape:

Then keep the reply. A written acknowledgement from the broker is what authorizes you to bill, and it converts a disputed claim into an administrative one.

Why ELD data alone won’t get you paid

It’s worth being direct about this, because software vendors are not.

Telematics from a certified ELD gives you an unarguable record of when the truck entered and left a geofence. Transportation attorneys and technology-forward brokers treat that as reliable. Traditional brokers and distribution centres frequently don’t, and their objection isn’t unreasonable: a truck sitting inside a facility geofence doesn’t establish that the driver checked in at the guard shack, was staged at an assigned door, or was ready to load.

So ELD records are corroboration, not proof. They’re extremely good at what they do, which is confirming a timeline you’ve already established through the paperwork, and closing the gap when facility staff refuse to write times down. They rarely carry a disputed claim on their own — the boundary is worth understanding precisely.

Submit within 48 hours

Rate confirmations commonly require the detention invoice and supporting documents within 24 to 48 hours of load completion, and collection rates fall sharply past that mark. Deadlines vary: one large shipper’s schedule gives 72 hours for driver-assist charges specifically, so read yours rather than assuming.

When the facility won’t sign

When facility staff won’t record arrival and departure times, four steps preserve most of the claim:

1. Write the check-in time, door assignment time, and release time on the face of the BOL by hand.
2. Add a line stating that the shipper or receiver refused to record in and out times. Get the clerk’s first name or employee number, write it down, then date and initial the entry.
3. Photograph the annotated BOL, the door number, and any visible dock clock, while still inside the facility.
4. Send the annotated BOL and the ELD record to the broker immediately on departure, not at end of day.

Broker acceptance of this varies and it isn’t a guaranteed fix. It works considerably better when a real-time notice was already sent, because at that point the annotation corroborates something the broker already knew about rather than introducing it after the fact.

What gets denied, and what’s worth fighting

That last one deserves a note. Some brokers pay detention only after the shipper reimburses them, and pass the denial straight through when the shipper refuses. Whether they’re entitled to do that depends on what your agreement actually says, and the standard templates point the other way.

The broker-carrier agreement template published by a Canadian brokers’ association makes the broker the sole party responsible for paying the carrier, and states that the broker’s failure to collect from its own customer does not exonerate it. Knight-Swift’s agreement likewise directs the carrier to look solely to the broker for payment. Neither makes payment contingent on the shipper.

So before accepting a pass-through denial, read the clause. If your agreement contains no contingent-payment language, the broker is the party you contracted with.

Which claims to write off

Some are not worth the labour, and knowing which protects the time you spend on the rest:

• No notice sent. Where the agreement makes notice a condition of collecting, this is a process-improvement signal rather than a collection opportunity.
• No detention terms on the rate confirmation. Nothing to enforce.
• Under an hour of billable time. Assembling and chasing a $40 claim manually costs more than the claim, unless the packet assembles itself.

Writing those off isn’t defeat. It’s what makes the winnable claims economic — though the habit is easy to over-apply.

A checklist you can copy

What to do next

If you’ve been denied recently, pull the claim and check it against the packet above in order. In most cases the failure is the notice or the submission window rather than the evidence, and both of those are process problems you can fix this week without renegotiating anything.

If it’s happening repeatedly, the fix is upstream: the notice has to fire reliably at the two-hour mark on every load, not when someone remembers. Doing that by hand across a fleet is the part that breaks down, which is why we built DwellWatch to detect the dwell and assemble the packet automatically.

Worth knowing before you renegotiate anything: what a normal detention rate actually looks like.