Detention & demurrage disputes
Driver waited 4 hours past free time. Receiver claims it was 90 minutes. There's no signed driver log. Without dispatch documentation, the $400 detention disappears.
Freight A/R has its own pathologies: brokers stretch payment past 60 days standard; shippers dispute detention because the driver didn't get the right signature; demurrage piles up in container yards. RevRecoup works freight A/R under your fleet's name — using BOL/POD matching, accessorial doc review, and broker-side persistence. We know rate confirmations, lumper fees, and the difference between detention and demurrage.
The problem
Your dispatch team books loads. Your driver runs them. Your accessorials are documented. And then 60-90 days go by and the broker AP department "hasn't gotten to it yet." Without a dedicated A/R function, half the accessorials get written off and broker invoices age into oblivion.
Driver waited 4 hours past free time. Receiver claims it was 90 minutes. There's no signed driver log. Without dispatch documentation, the $400 detention disappears.
Broker advertised 30-day pay; reality is 60-90. The factor wants their 3% on top. Your margin is gone before you've been paid.
Lumper, sort-and-segregate, fuel surcharge, layover, redelivery, driver assist. Each is documented somewhere. Invoicing and following up on each one full-time is a 0.5 FTE job nobody's doing.
How it works
We're not a generalist agency that learned trucking last week. Our freight team came from carrier A/R departments. We know rate cons, BOLs, PODs, the difference between detention (driver) and demurrage (container), and how the major brokers pay (or don't).
Export from McLeod, TMW, Axon, AMS, AscendTMS, Tailwind — whatever you run. Plus access to BOLs, PODs, signed driver logs, and rate confirmations.
Rate con + BOL + POD + accessorial documentation + signed driver log. When broker AP gets the packet, "we don't see the documentation" stops being an excuse.
Email + phone + broker portal follow-up. We know which broker AP teams respond to email, which need phone calls, and which need escalation to ops. We have direct lines into 200+ brokers.
No setup fee, no monthly minimum. Daily activity log so you see every touch. We get paid when the wire hits.
Real scenarios we work
Three patterns that come up weekly — with the actual playbook we run.
Driver logs show detention; broker accounting says "receiver disputes the time." Some loads have signed Bill of Lading times, some don't.
What we do — For the loads with signed times, we file detention claims with documentation packets and a 30/60/90 cadence. For the loads without signed times, we extract the ELD record (driver hours-of-service) which shows actual time on-duty at the receiver. We submit the ELD as documentation, which is increasingly accepted by broker AP. Typical recovery: 60-75% of the disputed detention.
Containers sat past free time at the rail yard. The customer agreed to pay demurrage in writing. Now they're saying the rail caused the delay, not them.
What we do — We pull the rail's API or AAR data showing when the container was actually available, the customer's pickup window in the email trail, and the steamship line's demurrage tariff. We run a three-way reconciliation showing the actual responsible party. When the customer is responsible (most cases), we collect. When the rail caused it, we file the claim with the rail.
You factor your invoices but the factor isn't chasing aged accounts — they just discount more aggressively. You're losing 5-7 points of margin to factoring + bad debt.
What we do — We work the aged bucket as a portfolio against the original shipper customers (with your factor's authorization). Recovery here gets you back the spread the factor would have eaten. Carriers and brokers in the same factoring relationship can save 40-60% of factor fees by adding A/R recovery on top.
FAQ
Yes. If you're factored, we coordinate directly with your factor — we don't step on their UCC. Most factors welcome us because we recover money they've given up on. Tell us your factor on the intro call and we'll work the relationship correctly.
We work them, but we're honest about the odds. Some brokers are on industry watchlists for a reason — they're distressed or run by people who plan to walk. We'll grade the broker's creditworthiness before working their A/R hard, so you don't waste your contingency on a hopeless case.
Traditional freight collections is litigation-first: demand letters, lawsuits, surety bond claims. That's effective on dead accounts but kills the relationship with brokers you want to keep working with. We start with documented persistence under your fleet's name. We escalate to litigation only when you authorize. The broker experiences us as your billing team being well-organized, not as a hostile collector.
Yes — for FMCSA-licensed brokers we'll file a BMC-84/BMC-85 surety bond claim within the 60-90 day window (depending on the bond). Most carriers don't even know they have this remedy. The bond is $75k and goes pro-rata if multiple carriers file, so timing matters. We file fast.
We work US/CA cross-border and Mexico cross-border. International (transatlantic, transpacific) gets harder because of jurisdiction — we'll be candid about which lanes we can work and which we'd refer to a specialist firm.
For each load: rate confirmation, BOL with signature, POD with signature, accessorial docs (lumper receipt, detention timer, layover proof), driver log (paper or ELD export). The more complete the packet, the higher the recovery. Missing PODs cut recovery rates roughly in half.
Pure contingency on recovered amounts. Rate scales by load value and aging. Older + smaller invoices = higher rate. Newer + larger = lower. Quoted on the intro call after we see a sample of your AR.
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