Tracing an Approved Accessorial That Never Reached Your Settlement

Where an approved accessorial should appear, and what this guide does not cover

Accessorial is the billing word for everything you are paid that is not linehaul: detention at a shipper or receiver, layover when you are held overnight, TONU when a booked load is cancelled after you were dispatched, stop-off pay for the pickups and drops between the first and the last, plus lumper reimbursement, driver assist, tarping, reefer fuel, redelivery and reconsignment. What each of those charges is, and how it is quoted and billed, is covered in detail on truckerpro.ca.

Approved means somebody with authority agreed to pay it: an accessorial written into the rate confirmation and triggered by the facts, or a charge added and confirmed in writing during the trip. Everything upstream of that moment — how a wait is documented, who has to be notified and by when, how the charge is claimed — is a different job with its own two guides on truckerpro.ca, and this page deliberately does not repeat them. Start here once you believe the money was agreed, because from that point the causes are completely different: an unclaimed accessorial is missing from the billing, while an approved one is usually mislabelled, deferred or netted on the statement in front of you.

Where it should land is its own line in the earning block, after the linehaul line for the same load and before anything is deducted, carrying the load or trip number that earned it. The placement matters more than the label. A line sitting among the earnings is money added; the same words sitting in the deduction block are money taken back, which is a different guide and a different argument.

Some statements bundle everything into one figure per load instead. A bundled total is not auditable: you cannot tell a paid detention from a rounded-up rate, and neither can anyone you ask about it three weeks later. Asking in writing for a line-item statement is reasonable, most systems can produce one, and a payer who will not is telling you something about how the number was assembled.

It may already be on the statement under a name you were not looking for

Accessorial money reaches a statement through a pay code, and pay codes are named by whoever configured the system. The same approved detention shows up as detention, wait time, demurrage, other pay, misc pay, an adjustment, or a bare code with no words attached to it at all. Read every line in the earning block for the periods around that load, not only the ones whose names you already recognise.

Do not match on the amount. What reaches you has usually been through the pay policy first — a split, a cap, a rounding rule, an approval that trimmed the hours claimed — so the number on your statement often has no arithmetic relationship to the number on the payer's invoice. Match on references instead: load number, trip or leg number, the payer's own reference, and the period in which the linehaul for that load was paid.

The references are the second trap. A broker's load number, the carrier's internal load number and the trip number on a multi-stop or relay run are three different strings for the same work, and a credit posted under one of the other two reads like an unrelated line. On a load handed between drivers, an accessorial usually attaches to the leg where the wait happened, which may not be the leg you ran, and whether it then follows the leg or the whole load is a pay-policy question worth asking once rather than per load.

The last hiding place is the load line itself. When a stop was added mid-trip or a wait was resolved by revising the rate confirmation, the extra money often arrives as a higher load rate rather than as a separate accessorial line. Compare the load line against the revision that was in force for the work you actually did, not against the original rate confirmation, before concluding anything is missing.

TONU, layover and stop-off land differently once approved

TONU pays without a linehaul, so it arrives as a load with no miles, which is an awkward shape for a mileage-paid statement. Some layouts drop it out of the mileage summary entirely and pay it as a flat line elsewhere on the page, so the per-mile totals at the top will not account for it and the load looks unpaid until you read further down. If an advance or a fuel draw had already been taken against the load that then cancelled, the recovery still posts, and a modest TONU line with a full recovery against it can net to nothing.

Layover is usually a flat daily amount approved separately from the load, which is why it so often carries the date of the approval rather than the night you sat. Look for it in the period the approval was entered, and expect it as its own dated line rather than as something attached to the load line.

Stop-off pay is the one most likely to be invisible rather than absent. An extra stop gets handled either as a separate accessorial line or as a revised load rate, and carriers are inconsistent about which, sometimes within the same week. If the statement shows no stop-off line, check whether the load rate moved before deciding the stop went unpaid.

Lumper fees, tolls, permits and border fees are reimbursements rather than earnings, and they usually travel on a different code and sometimes in a different block of the statement. That has two consequences worth knowing: they can legitimately sit outside a percentage calculation, and a plate-billed toll arrives weeks after the trip, so a toll pass-through routinely settles on a different statement from the load that caused it. Ontario's 407 ETR is the standard example of that lag.

Approved to the carrier is not the same as passed through to you

A charge can be billed, collected, and still not reach you, because two separate agreements are involved. The one between the carrier and its customer decides whether the charge is paid at all. The one between you and the carrier decides what happens to it afterwards. Full pass-through, a split, a cap, or the carrier retaining it against the work of chasing it are all common arrangements, and none of them is a billing error. Settle that question once, in writing, rather than per load.

If you are paid a percentage, ask which percentage. Percentage arrangements are written both ways — a share of what was billed, and a share of what was actually collected — and the difference decides whether an uncollected accessorial is money you are owed or money that never came into existence. Do not assume the harsher reading. In the United States the federal truth-in-leasing rules (49 CFR 376.12) require a lease between an authorised carrier and the owner of the equipment to state the basis of compensation on the face of the lease, precisely because it varies from lease to lease. Your own agreement answers this, not the industry norm.

Where a leased owner-operator is paid a percentage of the revenue for a shipment, those same US rules require the lease to give the owner access to the rated freight bill, or an equivalent document showing the same charges, so that what the customer actually paid is answerable rather than a matter of trust. Brokers must separately keep a record of each transaction, and parties to that transaction have a right of review, although broker-carrier contracts commonly ask the carrier to waive it, so what was signed decides the answer. Canada has no direct federal equivalent to either: access to the underlying invoice comes from your contract or it does not exist.

None of that reaches an employee driver's pay stub, where accessorial money is a payroll line set by company policy and there is no lease sitting behind it. Which document you are holding changes the whole question, and the two are set side by side in the sibling guides for each country.

Cross-period corrections, and how they read on a later statement

The quiet and very common answer is that nothing is wrong. An accessorial still open when the load settled lands in a later pay period than its linehaul, so one load spans two statements and the money you are hunting is on the next one, under the original load number but carrying the later period's date.

Corrections arrive in two shapes. The clean one is a single positive line referencing the original load. The confusing one is a reversal and reissue: the original line is backed out in full and a corrected line is added, so a period that pays you more can still contain a large negative entry. Read the pair together before concluding money was taken away, because only the net of the two actually moved.

A reversal can also sit in a different block from the line it reverses — a negative earning row in one layout, a deduction row in another — which is exactly how a reversal-and-reissue pair sitting pages apart comes to look like a chargeback. The labels to scan for are prior period adjustment, retro, correction, or any line whose period-ending date does not match the load's dates.

The timing has one consequence past the statement itself. A correction falls into the pay period it was issued in, not the period the load ran in, which is why a year of statements never ties exactly to a year of loads. That is a reconciliation problem at year end rather than a shortage, and the year-end slip guide covers how to square the two.

Matching an accessorial credit back to a load number

Start from the settlement rather than from memory. Take the unexplained credit and ask what references it carries: a load or trip number, the payer's reference, a document or voucher number, an invoice id. One of them usually resolves it. If the line carries no reference at all, that is itself the thing to raise, because a line nobody can trace to a load cannot be audited by you or by the person who issued it.

When the line carries only a trip number, map it through the dispatch record: a trip covers several loads or legs, and the load whose stop had the wait is the one to check. When it carries only the payer's reference, match it against the rate confirmation bearing the same reference rather than against your own load list, since your list is keyed to a number the payer may never have used.

Work in both directions. From your side, list the loads where an accessorial was approved and note the period each one's linehaul was paid in, then walk forward through the following statements looking for a credit carrying either reference. Most accessorials that feel missing turn up on the second or third statement after the load, which is also why the search is worth doing before the conversation rather than during it.

Ask for the source document behind a line rather than an explanation of it. Which invoice or voucher generated this line, and against which load, is a lookup someone can perform in a minute and hand back. Why is my detention missing is an argument, and it produces a reply about policy rather than a reference you can follow.

If the credit genuinely is not there after the next statement or two, you have stopped tracing and started disputing, and that has its own procedure, order of escalation and recourse. The sibling guide covers it; the short version is that it goes in writing, by load number, inside whatever window your agreement sets.

Keeping the match cheap is mostly a records problem. When arrival and departure timestamps, the stop, the leg and the load reference are captured as a by-product of dispatch rather than typed up afterwards, the chain from a settlement line back to a load already exists before anybody needs it, and matching a credit stops being an afternoon's work.

Lines that look like a missing accessorial but are not

Paid, then netted. An accessorial can be paid in full and removed in the same period by an offset — a cargo claim chargeback, a late paperwork penalty, an advance recovery, a fuel-card draw — and the net effect is indistinguishable from never having been paid. Check the deduction side before concluding anything, since the two lines can sit pages apart. What each of those deductions is allowed to cover, and which document proves it, belongs to the chargeback and advance guides rather than to this one.

A border wait is not automatically detention. A customs hold, a PARS or PAPS release or an examination is a delay no dock caused, and many rate confirmations either exclude it from detention or handle it under a separate border or exam line. So the money may be on the statement under that other label, or it may be genuinely absent because the rate confirmation never provided for it. The document decides which; the statement only reflects the decision.

Whether tax belongs on the accessorial line at all is a separate subject with its own rules, including interlining and international freight, and it is covered in full in the GST/HST guide. It is not something to infer from how another carrier's invoice looks.

And the case to rule out last: the charge was never actually approved. If nobody agreed to pay it, the settlement is not wrong and there is nothing to trace, because the claim was never made. That is where the two truckerpro.ca guides on documenting and claiming accessorials pick the story up.

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