Your carrier may not own a ship. Whose free time counts?

The site has argued twice that demurrage and detention software counts the wrong thing. First that it counts one clock when the port runs another. Then that five published tariffs disagree on what a free day is.

Here is the third one, and it is the simplest to check: the tool may be reading the right kind of document, counted the right way, belonging to the wrong company.

The carrier on your bill of lading may not own a ship

A non-vessel-operating common carrier is defined in one sentence that contains the whole problem. It is “a common carrier that does not operate the vessels by which the ocean transportation is provided, and is a shipper in its relationship with an ocean common carrier.”

Read it twice. The NVOCC is a carrier to you and a shipper to the line. It books space from the vessel operator under the line’s terms, and it sells you carriage under its own. Two contracts, two sets of free time, and your name is on exactly one of them.

So when an importer moving cargo under a house bill of lading looks up the free time in the vessel operator’s tariff, they are reading the terms of somebody else’s contract. It may be longer than theirs. It may be shorter. It is not theirs.

The NVOCC’s free time is published, by obligation

The useful half of this is that the document you actually need is public.

Free time is a tariff rule, a term governing the application of a charge, and the publication duty is flat: “Carriers and conferences must publish in their tariffs any rule that affects the application of the tariff.” Tariffs are kept “open for public inspection”.

And the regulator tells you where to look. Every carrier submits Form FMC-1 before it begins service, stating “the location of its tariffs, and the publisher, if any, used to maintain its tariffs”, and the Commission publishes “a list of the locations of all common carrier and conference tariffs”. If the NVOCC has not maintained one, the rule names the consequence rather than leaving it to practice: failure to do so “will result in revocation of an NVOCC’s license”, or suspension of registration for a foreign-based unlicensed one. A foreign-based NVOCC that registers instead of licensing has to “post a bond or other surety in the required amount, and publish a tariff as required by 46 CFR part 520”.

The route for a desk is therefore mechanical, and it is four steps long: read the carrier name off the bill of lading, find where that carrier’s tariff is published, open the rules, then check whether your own service contract overrides them.

It also decides who can invoice you

This is not only a counting problem. The NVOCC is one of the three parties the rules allow to bill demurrage and detention at all.

A “billing party” is “the ocean common carrier, marine terminal operator, or non-vessel-operating common carrier who issues a demurrage or detention invoice”. The charge itself is defined the same way: demurrage and detention “mean any charges, including ‘per diem’ charges, assessed by ocean common carriers, marine terminal operators, or non-vessel-operating common carriers related to the use of marine terminal space (e.g., land) or shipping containers, but not including freight charges.”

Which means the invoice-content requirements attach to the NVOCC’s invoice exactly as they do to the line’s. It has to state “The allowed free time in days”, “The start date of free time” and “The end date of free time”, and it has to name “the applicable rule or contract” the rate came from. That last field is the one to read first: it tells you which tariff the biller thinks governs you, and a biller citing the wrong document has given you the argument in writing.

One container can therefore carry three potential billers on two clocks, and a desk whose records hold a single free-time number, with no note of whose tariff it came from, cannot tell which of them is right.

The question that finds out in a demo

The previous two posts in this cluster each closed on a vendor test. This one’s is the shortest of the three.

Open a shipment in the tool and ask: where did this free time come from?

• “It’s the standard for this lane”. The tool is holding a default. Defaults are how a desk ends up counting back from the wrong day on the one shipment that mattered.
• “From the carrier”. Ask which carrier. If the answer is the line and the bill of lading is a house bill, the tool has resolved the term from a contract you are not party to.
• “From the carrier on the bill of lading, out of this tariff, edition this, and your service contract overrides it here” — that is the answer. The figure is traceable to a document, and so is the last free day derived from it.

The reason to care is that the error is silent. A free-time figure two days too generous does not announce itself; it produces a calendar that looks calm until the invoice lands. Document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time as it is, and a week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000. Starting that race from somebody else’s contract is not a margin of error anyone budgets for.

What demurrage and detention software should do with the tariff is the ordinary thing: store it per carrier and per lane, with the source and the edition, and work the document deadlines backwards from a last free day that can be traced to a published rule. Then the demurrage invoice, when it comes, meets a dated record rather than a recollection.