Your Freight Contracts Are Failing After They’re Signed
After the contract is signed, control weakens.
Freight contracts usually look solid when they’re signed.
Problems surface later, when invoices arrive, and no one involved in the original decision is in the room. That gap between award and invoice is where negotiated terms stop behaving the way procurement expects.
What Changes After Award
Freight contracts are designed to set boundaries. Rates define pricing. Free-time terms limit exposure. Accessorial rules are intended to contain variability.
Execution rarely follows that structure.
Terminal congestion, equipment availability, gate access, and local operating conditions determine how contractual terms are applied on the ground. Detention, demurrage, chassis, and storage charges arise from these conditions, even though they receive limited attention during contract negotiation.
By the time an invoice reaches procurement for review, the negotiations that shaped the contract are long finished, and the conditions under which it is executed have already changed.
Why Do Accessorial Charges Create the Most Disputes?
This pattern is well documented, and our team identifies numerous routine errors across all invoice modes.
The U.S. Federal Maritime Commission has identified detention and demurrage as the most common category of billing complaints filed by shippers, often tied to inconsistent application of free-time rules and terminal practices¹.
The Journal of Commerce has repeatedly reported that accessorial charges have become the primary source of friction among shippers, ocean carriers, and terminals, particularly as congestion and equipment availability vary by port and region².
The reality is that Accessorials sit at the intersection of execution behavior and contract logic. When enforcement begins during invoice review, recovery depends on dispute resolution rather than prevention.
When Enforcement Becomes a Back-Office Activity
Most procurement teams rely on post-payment audits and invoice disputes to address misapplied charges.
In most companies, that approach is necessary but limited. Why?
Disputes consume time, strain carrier and forwarder relationships, and resolve individual invoices without addressing the execution patterns that caused the charges. Over time, contracts lose authority as operating tools.
What governs behavior becomes what is challenged, not what was negotiated.
The Hidden Risk of Letting Others Define the Record
In the absence of internal execution oversight or a Freight Spend dashboard that provides clear insights, many shippers and companies rely on carrier or forwarder data as their system of record.
This introduces a structural imbalance.
Carriers report on their own billing logic and systems. Terminals apply local interpretations of rules. Forwarders aggregate information without enforcing contract terms. Procurement ends up reconciling versions of events instead of managing compliance.
Without an independent execution record and a single source of truth, distinguishing legitimate charges from preventable ones becomes difficult, and teams lose a tremendous amount of time.
How Procurement Teams Are Regaining Control
Procurement teams are seeing the same pattern repeat: invoice review comes too late to influence freight costs.
BlueCargo sits earlier in the flow.
It captures what actually happens to containers and ties those events back to contract terms before charges are issued. That evidence exists while decisions can still be questioned and corrected.
The effect is practical. Fewer escalations. Fewer retroactive arguments. Contract value defended with facts.
Why This Matters Going Into 2026 Contract Season
By the time freight costs are reviewed, the decisions behind them are already made, exactly at this time of the year.
We’re meeting with procurement, logistics, and finance leaders at Manifest 2026 and TPM26 to pressure-test whether their controls actually work in practice as freight moves.
If invoice review is still where control begins, we definitely should talk.
Meet with us at Manifest 2026 and at TPM26
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Sources and References
1) U.S. Federal Maritime Commission (FMC)
Interpretive Rule on Demurrage and Detention Under OSRA
https://www.fmc.gov/resources/detention-and-demurrage/
2) Federal Maritime Commission
OSRA 2022 Enforcement and Billing Transparency Initiatives
3) Journal of Commerce (JOC)
Coverage of detention, demurrage, and accessorial charge disputes
https://www.joc.com/maritime-news/container-lines/detention-demurrage
4) TPM26 Program
The Contract-to-Cash Playbook: How Leading Importers Unlock Profits Trapped in Their Supply Chain
