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Most freight invoices go out for the rate confirmation amount. The extra charges the load actually earned (detention, layover, lumpers, extra stops) often never make it on, because the invoice was built before the load was finished. Enter two numbers and see what that gap costs in a year.
Loads per month
Average revenue per load (USD)
ClearLane’s pre-billing revenue audit reviews every load before the invoice leaves, as part of running your billing desk. See how the pre-billing audit works or request a demo.
Revenue leakage is billable money your operation earned but never invoiced. It rarely happens as one big miss. It happens load by load, and usually for one simple reason: the invoice exists before the load is over. In many operations the invoice is pre-built in the TMS from the rate confirmation as soon as the load is booked. Then the real load happens. The driver waits four hours at the dock. The delivery moves to the next morning and the driver sleeps in the truck. The driver pays a lumper out of pocket. The shipper adds a stop by phone. Every one of those is billable. But the invoice is already sitting in the system at the rate-con amount, and the moment the POD lands, it goes out exactly as it was built.
Annual billed revenue x 2-5% = estimated uncaptured revenue. A brokerage moving 2,500 loads a month at a $1,000 average moves $30M a year. At 2-5%, that is $600,000 to $1,500,000 earned but never invoiced: detention, layover, TONU, and lumper fees that died between dispatch and billing.
Four places, in order of frequency. Detention that was real but has no proof: the driver sat at the dock for hours, but nobody recorded in and out times, so there is nothing to bill against. Charges agreed over the phone: the broker approves a layover or an extra stop in a call with the dispatcher, and it never gets typed into the TMS. The dispatcher is paid to keep trucks moving, not to update invoices, so the charge dies in that phone call. Lumper receipts that never travel: the driver pays at the dock, and the receipt stays in the cab or in a text thread instead of reaching the billing desk. And TONU: when a load cancels, the truck-ordered-not-used fee is billable, but chasing it feels awkward, so it often never gets invoiced at all.
Thirty seconds, two numbers, and you will know if your billing desk is leaving accessorials on the table.
Related reading: the four charge types brokers never bill and where revenue is lost before the invoice.
Every one of these was earned on the load and documented somewhere. It just never reached the shipper invoice.
| Charge type | Why it goes unbilled | Where it gets caught |
|---|---|---|
| Detention | Driver arrival and departure times sit in dispatch notes and never reach billing. | Pre-billing audit, before the invoice goes out |
| Layover | Authorized verbally, never written into the load file. | Pre-billing audit |
| TONU | Truck ordered not used, and nobody opens a billing event for it. | Pre-billing audit |
| Lumper fees | The receipt stays in the driver paperwork and never gets passed through. | POD and document chase |
| Contract rate discrepancy | An auto-populated rate goes stale after a rate change. | Rate confirmation matching |
Detention is the largest single line in most leakage estimates, and it is also the least well measured. The US DOT Office of Inspector General found detention associated with $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in reduced annual earnings for truckload drivers and $250.6 million to $302.9 million in reduced net income for truckload carriers, and concluded that accurate industry-wide detention data does not currently exist because most parties only measure time beyond what the contract allows.
That last point matters for how you read any leakage percentage, including ours. There is no authoritative public figure for revenue earned and never billed, because the charges that go uncaptured are by definition the ones nobody recorded. The 2 to 5 percent range here is our own planning figure from running these desks, not a published statistic. Measure your own capture rate and the estimate stops mattering.
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From ClearLane’s operational experience running freight billing desks: when invoices go out without a pre-billing review, the revenue that never gets captured consistently lands between 2% and 5% of billable revenue. High-volume operations with informal accessorial tracking sit at the top of that range.
Detention and layover lead, because they depend on timestamps and phone approvals that rarely make it into the TMS before the invoice is built. Lumper fees follow: the driver pays at the dock, and the receipt has to physically travel from the cab to the billing desk to get rebilled. TONU fees on canceled loads leak most quietly, because there is no delivery to remind anyone. The pattern behind all four is the same: the charge is born outside the system that builds the invoice.
It runs as part of ClearLane managing your billing desk: every load is reviewed against its rate confirmation and documents before the invoice goes out, so earned charges get captured while the paperwork is still fresh. It is performance-based and tied to the billing engagement, not a standalone product.
