Ask a carrier where margin goes and the answer is usually fuel, insurance and equipment. Those costs are real, and mostly outside your control. The costs you can control tend to hide in the office: hours of detention nobody billed, check calls that interrupt dispatch, and paperwork that has to be keyed in before a load can be invoiced.
Costs are at a record high
The American Transportation Research Institute's 2026 analysis of operating costs found that running a truck cost $2.336 per mile in 2025, an all-time high and up 3.4% from 2024. Excluding fuel, costs rose even faster, 4.2% to $1.854 per mile, with driver wages and benefits both climbing.
When the cost of every mile goes up, the miles you can't bill, and the hours spent waiting, hurt more.
Detention is a $15 billion problem
ATRI's 2024 detention research put numbers on something every driver already knows:
- Trucks were detained at 39.3% of stops in 2023, and more often for refrigerated and spot-market freight.
- Detention cost the for-hire industry $3.6 billion in direct expenses and $11.5 billion in lost productivity that year, more than 135 million hours of lost time.
- Detained trucks then drove 14.6% faster on average, as drivers tried to make up lost time.
Much of that cost is never recovered, because detention is hard to prove after the fact. Arrival and departure times live in the ELD, the agreed free time lives in the rate confirmation, and the claim has to be assembled by hand.
Where the back office loses time
Most carriers we talk to see the same three patterns:
- Paperwork per load. Rate confirmations, bills of lading and proofs of delivery arrive as PDFs and photos, then get re-typed into the TMS before billing can start.
- Check calls. Shippers and brokers call for status updates the carrier already has in its tracking data.
- Accessorials left on the table. Detention, layovers and lumper fees go unbilled because the evidence is scattered.
What automation actually fixes
None of this requires replacing your TMS. The highest-return systems sit around the tools you already use:
- Document processing reads rate confirmations, BOLs and PODs, matches them to the load and drafts the invoice for review.
- Detention capture compares geofenced arrival and departure times against the free time in the rate confirmation, flags detention as it happens and drafts the claim with the evidence attached.
- Status automation answers check calls and sends proactive updates from live tracking data, so dispatch is only interrupted for real exceptions.
Where to start
Pick the workflow with the clearest number attached. For most carriers that is days from delivery to invoice or detention hours billed versus detention hours incurred. Measure it for two weeks, automate one step and measure again.
If you run a fleet or a brokerage and want to see what that looks like on your own lanes, we're happy to walk through it.
