Demurrage and detention software: finish the pack in time

Demurrage and detention software is worth buying for one outcome and one only: the document pack is complete before the last free day, so there is nothing to pay. Everything else in the category, the dashboards, the dispute workflows, the freight audit that catches the charge after the invoice lands, arrives too late to change the number.

Free time starts at discharge. It does not start when your exporter couriers the originals, or when the bank releases documents against payment, or when the fumigation stamp finally arrives. It counts calendar days and it does not ask.

Document packs routinely run about eight days late against free time. A week of demurrage on one container has cost US$12,000. One missed pack a month annualises to US$12,000 to US$24,000.

None of those eight days were a shipping problem.

Why do two clocks decide whether you pay?

Every shipment runs two clocks at the same time.

The port clock starts on discharge and counts down your free days. It is set by the carrier’s tariff or, if you negotiated one, by your service contract.

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, your customs broker.

When the second clock loses, you pay storage on a container that was never physically delayed. The box was there. The paper was not.

The US Federal Maritime Commission’s interpretive rule on demurrage and detention is useful here because it says out loud what the charge is for. The rule tests these charges against what it calls the “incentive principle”: whether the charge actually serves to move cargo. Read that from the importer’s side and the conclusion is blunt. The charge exists to make you finish your paperwork. Finish it and there is nothing to argue about.

What does prevention mean in practice?

It means running the clock backwards.

Most systems work forwards from booking. Booking, then sailing, then ETA, then arrival, then a scramble. Prevention starts from the other end.

1. Derive the last free day from discharge, using the free time on your contract for that carrier and that lane.
2. Take the full document checklist for the lane, the destination and the letter of credit.
3. Assign each item to the party who owes it, with a deadline set backwards from the last free day, not forwards from booking.
4. Chase every one of those parties, daily, until the item arrives.
5. Check each document as it lands, against the purchase contract, so a wrong one is caught while there is still time to reissue it.
6. Escalate the moment someone goes quiet.

Step four is where every other product stops.

Which kind of demurrage and detention software is this?

The category sells three different things under one name, and it pays to know which one you are looking at.

Visibility and alerts. The container’s milestones from the carrier, a free-time countdown, an alert when the last free day is near. Useful. It tells a person to act.

Audit and dispute. The carrier’s invoice checked against your contract rates, the gate and pick-up messages kept as evidence, a workflow for contesting the charge. Useful after you have already been billed.

Laytime claims. Charter-party demurrage on a bulk or tanker voyage, calculated from the statement of facts. A different trade and a different clock.

The noun changes, the kinds do not. The same three products come back as a demurrage management system, as demurrage planning software, or as detention billing automation, and nothing inside them changes with the name. Work out which of the kinds above you are being shown before you compare two of them on price.

Docket is a fourth kind. It works the cause, which is the document pack, and it does the acting: the chase, the check, the escalation. The others show you the clock. This one finishes the paperwork before it runs out.

What demurrage software means on a container import

The shortest name for the category is the most ambiguous one. Searched on its own, demurrage software returns two trades that share a word and nothing else: container demurrage, which is a carrier’s charge on a box that sat at the terminal past its free days, and charter-party laytime demurrage, which is settled between owner and charterer from a statement of facts on a bulk or tanker voyage.

This page is the first one. If your demurrage arrives as a line on a carrier invoice against a container number, you are in the right place. If it arrives as a claim under a charter party, the calculation is different and so is the software for it.

What demurrage and detention alert software does, and what Docket does

VISCO, Shipzy, Gen10 and IGNITE all record the trade and record it well. Nobody in that list sends the email at 9am, notices no reply by Wednesday, and rings the supplier’s office on Thursday. That is the empty quadrant, and it is the only quadrant that changes the demurrage number.

How does the chase actually reach someone?

Four steps, on channels the counterparty already uses.

Email goes first. Twenty-four hours of silence moves the same ask to WhatsApp. Forty-eight hours moves it to SMS. Seventy-two hours triggers an AI voice call. Each step carries the shipment reference and one specific ask.

There is no portal and no login. Your supplier’s documentation clerk does not create an account, does not get invited, and does not need to know Docket exists. Products built as networks need every party onboarded before they help you, which is why enterprise implementations run into six and seven figures and take quarters. The ladder works on day one against a counterparty who has never heard of us.

Supplier chasing measures at about 85% automated on a live demo running a real import SOP end to end. Doc-pack drafting and checking measures at about 65%. We publish both rather than a single flattering figure, because the checking half genuinely needs a human on the exceptions and nobody should pretend otherwise.

What does the freed time do to the desk?

A 500-container month costs 1,100 hours of desk work at 2.2 hours a container. Seven people at 176 hours each is 1,232 hours. That desk runs at about 90% capacity on grunt work before it buys or sells anything.

Blended across all desk work, the automation rate is 70%. On that desk it returns 770 hours a month, which is 4.25 FTE of capacity.

Capacity, not headcount. The same seven people handle 1,000 to 1,200 containers instead of 500. Or two or three of them move to buying and selling, the work that produces the margin, while the machine runs the checklist. Nobody who ever grew a trading desk did it by having fewer hands.

At a loaded US$25 an hour, 770 hours is US$19,250 a month removed. Docket at 350 shipments on the Trade Desk rate is US$2,100. Net: US$17,150 a month, US$205,800 a year. Money freed minus what we cost.

Demurrage savings are deliberately left out of that base case. They sit on top, and they are the reason this page exists, but the ops number stands without them.

Free time is not a standard number, so do not treat it as one

This is the most common and most expensive assumption on an import desk.

Free time varies by carrier, and two lines calling the same port allow different periods. It varies by port and terminal, and again by whether the box moves to an inland container depot. It varies by direction and by equipment, so dry, reefer and special are not the same. And it varies by what you negotiated.

That last one is a real lever and it costs nothing to ask for. On a lane where the carrier wants your volume, extra free days are cheaper for them to give than a rate reduction, and worth more to you if your pack is habitually late.

Docket holds your carrier’s free-time terms per lane, next to the purchase contract: the free days, the demurrage and detention rates and the point they step up, per carrier, port pair and equipment. The last free day on every shipment is derived from that record, not from a default, and the carrier’s invoice can be read against the same terms when it arrives. We publish port free-time tables only where we hold a sourced row for a named carrier, and where we do not have it the page says so instead of showing a number that would be wrong for your lane. A confident wrong free-time figure is worse than a blank one, because you will plan against it.

A worked example, on the only numbers we publish

No tariff table, because we do not hold a sourced free-time row for your lane. What we can work through is the shape of the loss, using the figures published on this site and nothing else.

Take one container on a lane where the pack runs late by the usual margin.

Now the quieter version, which is the one that actually shows up in a year of accounts. One missed document pack a month, not a disaster, just the ordinary one that nobody escalates: US$12,000 to US$24,000 a year. No single event is large enough to trigger a meeting. The annual total is a salary.

Against that, the chase itself. Of the 2.2 hours a container takes, Docket is built to automate about 85% of the follow-up work, leaving roughly 20 minutes of judgement per container. The eight days are not a discipline problem. They are what a desk at about 90% capacity on grunt work produces, and the fix is to take the grunt work away rather than to ask the desk to try harder.

Two honest caveats. The US$12,000 is one reported incident, not an average, and it is not annualised anywhere on this site. And demurrage is deliberately left out of the return case we publish — the ops-cost saving is the number a trader can check against their own payroll this afternoon, and it stands on its own.

What Docket does not do

Docket does not move containers. It has no slots, no trucks and no equipment, and it cannot make a terminal release a box faster.

Docket does not replace your customs broker and does not file the customs declaration. Your broker files. What changes is that the pack reaches them complete and checked, days earlier, so the filing is routine instead of a rescue.

Docket does not remove congestion, customs holds, inspection queues or equipment shortages. Those cause demurrage too and no software touches them.

Docket does not dispute charges for you after the fact. Prevention and dispute are different products, and dispute is the one you buy when prevention already failed. If a bill has already landed, the separate walkthrough on disputing a demurrage invoice sets out which rules apply in which trade and what evidence each argument needs.

Docket does not claim to eliminate demurrage. It addresses the eight days that came from paperwork, which is most of the gap.

The second thing that happens on a tight shipment

Urgency is the fraudster’s favourite condition. A shipment inside free time with a chase running is exactly when a revised invoice arrives from a domain one character off the real one, with changed bank details and a note asking you to keep it quiet.

Docket screens every inbound email on a live shipment for four signals: look-alike sender domain, bank details changed mid-deal, beneficiary name that does not match the contract party, and urgency or secrecy language. One such attempt, on a single shipment, was US$62,500.

That works because the system already read the original contract and the original invoice. The check that prevents demurrage and the check that prevents payment diversion are the same capability aimed at two different losses.

Where to start

Pick your worst lane. The one where the pack is always late and everybody already knows which supplier it is.

Load the purchase contract, connect the mailbox, map the SOP. Setup starts at $1,500. Run that lane for a month and count one number: how many packs were complete before the last free day. That number is either better than last month or it is not, and it belongs to you, not to us.

Every figure on this page is either an operational baseline or comes off a published rule. Neither one knows your lane, your carrier or your customs broker.

If you have paid demurrage because a document was late, bring the invoice and the timeline. We will show you which day the chase would have started.