Why detention claims fail
A detention claim is a bill for time, and time is the one thing nobody at the dock is writing down carefully. The driver remembers arriving on time. The receiver's gate log, if there is one, records when the truck was checked in, which can be an hour after it joined the queue outside. The BOL has a signature and no clock. By the time the claim reaches the customer's accounts payable, three weeks later, the only contemporaneous evidence is a text message that says “here.”
So the claim is denied, or cut in half, or paid late, and the carrier who waited four hours learns that your loads cost them money. The claims that get paid are the ones where the times were recorded at the time by something other than a person, and where the customer was told detention was coming before it started.
What counts as proof
Two timestamps and a notice. Arrival: when the truck reached the facility, not when it reached a door. Departure: when it left the property. And the notice: when the customer was told free time was about to run out, which most contracts require before detention accrues. The rate confirmations we see put free time at two to four hours and require the broker to be told about thirty minutes before it ends. A claim with all three is a calculation. A claim missing any of them is a negotiation.
Screenshots of a map help less than people expect. A dot at the facility at 8:10 shows the truck was there at 8:10; it does not show when it arrived or that it never left. What a customer will accept is a continuous record, positions every few minutes from before arrival to after departure, from which the two crossings can be read.
How a geofence records a stop
A geofence is a circle drawn around the facility's coordinates. Every position the truck reports is checked against it. The first position inside the circle after a run of positions outside is the arrival. The first position outside after a run inside is the departure. Nobody taps a button, and the driver does not have to remember anything. The record is the positions themselves, with the times they were captured.
Two details keep it honest. The check runs on positions the truck actually reported, so a phone that died in the parking lot leaves a gap rather than a fabricated departure. And the crossing is confirmed by more than one position, so a single stray fix from a GPS bounce does not count as leaving. The result is an arrival and a departure with the same evidence behind them: the trail.
How big the fence should be
Bigger than the building. A fence drawn tightly around a warehouse records the truck arriving when it reaches the door, which is exactly the time you do not want, because the time the driver spent in the queue outside the gate is the detention. LoadSignal's default is a 500-metre radius, about a third of a mile, which covers the yard and the gate queue at most distribution centres without swallowing the truck stop across the road.
Some facilities need their own number. A port or a large plant with an internal road network can put the check-in booth a mile from the coordinates on file, and a fence that small will record the arrival long after the truck stopped moving. A small cross-dock on a busy street needs a tighter one so the fuel station next door does not count. Set the radius per facility, from 50 metres to a few kilometres, and correct it the first time a stop records wrong rather than living with the drift.
The other input is the facility's own coordinates. An address geocoded to the centre of a ZIP code is not a facility; it is a neighbourhood, and a fence around it proves nothing. Facilities should carry exact coordinates, and a board should say plainly when they do not, so a detention claim is never built on an approximate pin.
The timeline that wins
The claim that gets paid looks like this, and it is generated, not written:
- 07:52 truck enters the geofence at the receiver, 8 minutes before the 08:00 appointment
- 09:52 free time (two hours) ends; the customer was notified at 09:22
- 11:47 truck leaves the geofence
- Detention: 1 hour 55 minutes at the agreed rate
Every line has a position behind it and a time that was recorded when it happened. The notice at 09:22 is the line most claims are missing, and it is the easiest to automate: a rule that watches the clock from arrival and drafts the message thirty minutes before free time runs out, for a person to send.
The cases that still need a person
The truck arrives early. A driver who reaches the fence at 05:30 for an 08:00 appointment has not started the free-time clock at 05:30. Most contracts count from the appointment time or the arrival, whichever is later. The geofence records 05:30 truthfully; the calculation has to know the rule.
The driver is sent to a staging lot. Some receivers hold trucks in a lot down the road and call them in. If the lot is outside the fence, the record shows a truck parked nearby for three hours and then a short visit. That time is detention by any fair reading, and it needs the dispatcher's note on the load saying where the driver was told to wait.
The driver leaves the fence without leaving. A large yard can put the far end of the lot outside a fence that was set for the gate. The trail shows a brief exit and re-entry; a person reading it can see the truck never went anywhere, and the fence gets widened for next time.
Tracking stops inside the fence. A phone that dies at the dock leaves an arrival with no departure. The departure then comes from the driver's next position, wherever that is, and the claim should say so rather than guessing. What to do when tracking stops covers the rest of that situation.
Running it on every load
Geofences only prove detention if they are on every stop of every load, not on the ones someone remembered to set up. That means the fence is drawn the moment a facility gets exact coordinates, the radius is a facility setting with a sensible default, arrival and departure are written to the load as events with the positions behind them, and the free-time clock and the customer notice run from the arrival without a dispatcher starting them.
LoadSignal does this for every stop with exact coordinates. Free time is set per customer, the pre-notice is a rule that drafts the message for a person to send, a stop that runs past free time is raised as an exception, and the load's timeline holds the positions and the times for the claim. Facilities geocoded only to a city or ZIP are marked approximate, and nothing on them is presented as proof. The FAQ covers what the customer sees, and the tracking clause guide covers getting the positions in the first place.