Accessorial charges
What are accessorial charges?
Accessorial charges are the fees for services beyond the base move: waiting time, extra stops, liftgate, inside delivery, appointments, lumper fees, reschedules, TONU. They are where freight invoices get complicated and where margins are lost, because each one is triggered by an event that someone has to record for anyone to bill it.
How to keep them accurate
- Agree the amounts at booking, not at invoice: a waiting-time rate and a free window in the rate confirmation.
- Record the triggering event where it happens (arrival time, departure time, the extra stop address).
- Attach evidence per line: gate times, receipts, photos, the appointment record.
- Bill them from the same record the operation runs on, so an accessorials line is a lookup, not a reconstruction.
Where they go missing
Because the event and the invoice live in different places: the driver waited an hour (known at the dock) and nobody told billing (which learns at settlement, or never). The fix is boring: one record per load that carries the times, the stops and the exceptions, which both the operation and the invoice read from.