The invoice arrives and nobody knows why
A detention and demurrage charge lands in the finance team's inbox. It is attributed to a container that sat at the terminal for six days over free time. The logistics team blames customs. Customs blames the documentation. The documentation team says they sent everything on time.
The charge gets paid. It happens again next month.
What D&D actually measures
Detention and demurrage charges are not an arbitrary carrier fee. They are a precise measurement of how long coordination failed.
Containers belong to carriers. They come with a defined free period — typically between 5 and 14 days depending on the trade lane and the carrier contract. Every day beyond that free period is a day that somebody, somewhere, did not do something fast enough.
Customs was slow. A truck was not arranged. A warehouse appointment was missed. A document was incorrect. An approval was waiting in an inbox.
The charge is the monetisation of that delay.
The compounding problem
The challenge with D&D is that the costs accumulate before anyone notices. By the time the invoice arrives, the container has already been returned. The decisions that caused the charge happened days or weeks ago. The people involved have moved on to other shipments.
Without a real-time view of free day consumption across all active containers, teams are managing D&D reactively — paying charges for failures that could have been prevented with earlier visibility and faster coordination.
What proactive D&D management looks like
An autonomous execution layer monitors free day consumption continuously:
- Tracks remaining free days across every active container
- Flags containers approaching threshold three days before charges begin
- Coordinates customs, transport, and warehouse appointments proactively
- Escalates automatically when a container is at risk
- Challenges D&D invoices where internal calculations show the container was within free days
The result is not zero D&D — some charges are unavoidable in complex trade lanes. But the avoidable ones, which represent the majority, stop occurring systematically.
The audit function
When a D&D charge does arrive, an autonomous layer validates it against the internal operational record — when the container arrived, when it was gated out, what the contracted free days were, what surcharges apply. Charges that do not match the record are disputed automatically.
Most companies pay D&D invoices without challenging them because the audit is too time-consuming. With an automated audit layer, every invoice is checked. Recovery rates improve materially.