Detention-to-cash covers the full chain from dock delay to recovered payment. For most carriers and brokers, that chain still leaks revenue in ways they could avoid.
Trucking detention is the excessive time a driver spends at a shipper or receiver facility waiting to load or unload, typically beyond a standard two-hour free period. It acts as compensation for lost productivity, as drivers are usually paid for miles driven, not time spent sitting at a dock.
You can do the work and still never see the money.
Yup.
The driver waits. The truck engine runs, burns fuel and waits. The trailer waits. Ops watches it happen. Billing hears about it later. The customer questions the timestamps. The fee gets short-paid, disputed, or never even hits an invoice.
The problem doesn’t start in finance. It starts the moment the truck hits the dock.
ATRI’s 2024 detention analysis shows that detention accounted for 39.3% of all stops in 2023. Shippers burned more than 135 million hours, $3.6 billion in direct expenses, and $11.5 billion in productivity. Most fleets charge detention. Fewer than half of those fees ever turn into cash.
That’s the detention-to-cash problem in one sentence: the event is real, but the proof, the workflow, and the cash don’t connect. Most fleets do not even know how much you spend on detention and which locations are complete, let alone have any contracts in place with shippers to recover detention.
Visibility Alone Is Not Enough
Most companies think that seeing a truck at a facility solves the problem.
It doesn’t.
A red dot on a map is not a collectible detention invoice.
To turn delay into cash, you need a system that captures objective arrival and departure times, checks them against the free window, triggers the right notifications when the threshold is breached, and pushes an auditable record straight into billing.
EKA On-Time™ gives you lifecycle visibility across dispatch, pickup, detention, transit, and delivery. EKA DockTime™ sits on top of that and tracks arrival and departure against detention limits, with telematics-backed timestamps and automated alerts plus shipper notifications, when trucks sit too long.
That’s the gap in most operations. They can see the delay. They just can’t turn it into money consistently.
Why Detention-to-Cash Gets Stuck After the Delay
The causes are predictable. That means you should automate them.
The arrival time sits in a text thread or a driver call, not in a system of record. The customer wants to be notified when detention starts, but nobody sends it. Supporting documents arrive late, are incomplete, or are attached to the wrong load. Billing hears the story days later and has to reconstruct it. No one can clearly see which customers, facilities, or lanes create the worst detention leak.
So, teams treat detention like a service problem instead of what it really is: a revenue recovery workflow.
And in a market where non-fuel costs run $1.78 per mile, and spot still trails contract, letting recoverable revenue leak out of the back office doesn’t count as a paperwork issue. It’s a margin issue.
The Fix: One Platform, Complete Detention-to-Cash Automation
This is where the EKA stack matters. Not five tools bolted together with email threads and hope. One platform where the event, proof, workflow, invoice, and intelligence live in the same system.
EKA DockTime™ handles the event. It automates detention tracking, monitoring, and billing. It compares arrival and departure times to detention limits, sends alerts when trucks hit those “free” limits, auto-generates detention invoices with supporting data, and triggers automated driver detention pay. EKA customers cut 60-80% of manual detention-tracking work, go live in one to two weeks, and typically see ROI in under a year.
EKA Documents AI™ handles the proof. It automatically pulls in freight documents, separates them, reads and validates the data, matches everything to the right shipment, flags discrepancies before they turn into billing errors, and routes only low-confidence items for review while high-confidence docs auto-attach. Documents AI cuts 60-80% of manual data entry and processes documents with 90%+ accuracy.
Automated Workflows and WAMS handle the handoffs and exceptions. Auto-triggered updates, built-in status and exception alerts, doc-upload-to-invoice flows, and automatic driver pay, and settlements all run in the background. WAMS then watches those workflows in real time, flags missed deadlines, errors, and missing paperwork, and gives teams task-level visibility into what’s stuck and why.
Financial Optimization handles the invoice and cash. It drives auto-generated invoices, document-triggered billing flows, instant quote-to-invoice sync, quick pay, line-item margin tracking, and real-time cost and revenue dashboards.
Capturing detention correctly doesn’t help if the money still dies in a back-office bottleneck.
Action-Ready Intelligence handles what comes next. It delivers real-time awareness of margin tracking, load profitability alerts, lane analysis, shipper performance metrics, and role-based custom KPIs. On the detention side, that means you can finally see which customers, facilities, lanes, and patterns cost you money — while you still have time to renegotiate, reroute, or reprice.
That’s detention-to-cash.
Not just tracking the pain. Recovering the money.
Numbers That Tell the Complete Story
When detention-to-cash works, you can see it in a short list of numbers:
- Detention events captured versus detention events billed
- Average time from dock exit to detention invoice
- Detention claims payment rate
- Driver detention pay turnaround time
- Net detention dollars recovered by customer, facility, and lane
Those numbers tell you whether you manage detention or just watch it.
DockTime analytics emphasize reporting by shipper, facility, driver, lane, and time period. Action-Ready Intelligence focuses on real-time visibility into margins and performance. Together, they tie operational delay directly to financial outcome.
Detention is not a side issue. It’s not a paperwork issue. It’s not just a billing issue.
It is a margin issue. Full stop.
If you want to see where detention-to-cash breaks down in your operation, talk to EKA Solutions. With DockTime™, Documents AI™, Automated Workflows, WAMS, Financial Optimization, and Action-Ready Intelligence, the same platform that runs the load also protects the revenue you lose when trucks sit.