How to choose demurrage and detention software

Four products sell under this name, and the demo rarely tells you which one you are looking at. They share a vocabulary, a set of screenshots and a promise about free time. They do different things to the number on your invoice, and what each kind of demurrage and detention software does is worth reading before any call.

What follows is the shorter version: six questions, each of which has a checkable answer, and each of which a sales deck will avoid if the answer is inconvenient.

Which clock does it move

Every import runs two clocks. The port clock starts at discharge and counts down your free days. The paperwork clock starts whenever the last party in the chain decides to act: the exporter, the bank, the insurer, the chamber of commerce, the forwarder, the customs broker.

Demurrage is what you pay when the second clock loses. So the question is not whether the product knows about demurrage. It is which clock it touches. A tool that reports the port clock more accurately, more often, in a nicer colour, has still not moved the clock that decides the outcome.

Ask: what did this product change about the date the pack was complete?

Does it chase, or does it alert

An alert is a message to you. A chase is a message to the person holding the document.

That distinction sounds pedantic until you count the work. Supplier follow-ups, document preparation and checking, status tracking and payment tracking run to about 2.2 hours of desk work per container. An alert adds to that number, because someone on your desk now has to act on the alert. A chase removes from it.

Ask: who receives the message this product sends, me or the supplier?

Where does its last free day come from

Free time is not a standard number. It varies by carrier, port, terminal, direction and equipment, and two lines calling the same port allow different periods. Any product that shows you a last free day got it from somewhere, and there are only two possibilities: your contract, or a generic table.

A generic table is wrong for somebody on every lane, and the person it is wrong for is the one who plans against it and pays. If the vendor cannot say which carrier tariff or service contract a date came from, the date is decoration.

Ask: show me the free-time term this date came from, for this carrier and this lane.

Can it produce the lines an invoice has to carry

This is the question nobody expects, and it is the most useful one, because the answer is written down in law rather than in a brochure.

In US trade, 46 CFR § 541.6 sets out what a demurrage or detention invoice must contain as a minimum. Among the required lines: the bill of lading and container numbers, the allowed free time in days, the start date and the end date of free time, the container availability date on an import, the rate and the tariff or service contract it comes from, a contact for questions and the timeframes for requesting mitigation, refund or waiver, and a certification by the billing party that its own performance did not cause or contribute to the charge.

Read that list as a specification for your own records rather than the carrier’s. For any container that moved last month, can the product you are buying show you its version of each line? The date the box became available, the free time that applied, the day the pack went complete, who was chased and when, and what came back?

If it can, you can check the carrier’s invoice against your own account of the same facts, which is the whole of what it means to be able to dispute a demurrage invoice. If it cannot, you have bought a dashboard.

Does it reach the people who actually hold the paper

The documents that decide the outcome sit with counterparties: a supplier’s export executive, a bank’s documentary credit desk, a broker’s filing clerk, an inspection agency. None of them works for you and none of them is going to log in to your portal.

Any product whose chasing model requires the other side to onboard has quietly moved the hard part onto you, because now you are chasing people to join a system so that the system can chase them. Ask what channels it reaches counterparties on without their having to sign up for anything.

What it costs, against what it is preventing

Price this against an event rather than against a software budget. A week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000. One missed document pack a month annualises to US$12,000 to US$24,000. Document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time.

Against those numbers, per-shipment pricing in single-digit dollars is not the decision. The decision is whether the product changes the eight days. If you want to see the shape of the exposure on your own lane, the demurrage calculator takes your own free days and your own per-diem tiers and publishes no tariff of its own.

What none of them can do

No demurrage and detention software prevents congestion, a customs hold, an inspection or an equipment shortage. Any vendor claiming otherwise has told you something useful about the rest of their claims.

What is addressable is the paperwork clock. That is the part caused by a document that arrived late and a person who did not reply, and it is the part demurrage and detention software should be judged on. Six questions, and the one about the invoice lines is the one that will change how the call goes.