On a 12–18% margin business, the bleed isn't usually one bad load — it's carrier cost creeping up a point at a time and accessorials the brokerage pays but never bills back. Detention, lumper fees, layover, tarp, TONU: each is a real dollar paid to a carrier, and every one that doesn't get passed through to the shipper comes straight out of margin. This report tracks the buy-rate trend and quantifies exactly how much accessorial cost is leaking unrecovered.
What this report answers
Is our carrier cost as a share of revenue trending up — the buy-rate creep curve? How much are we paying carriers in accessorials, and on how many loads? And the money question: what share of those accessorials are we recovering from shippers, and how many dollars are we eating? The Carrier Cost Trend page tracks carrier cost % of revenue over time and by mode; the Accessorial Leakage page breaks accessorial cost down by type, sets what we paid against what we billed back, and ranks leakage by customer to show who isn't reimbursing.
The metrics that matter
Carrier Cost % of Revenue is a SUM/SUM ratio — the inverse of margin — and its trend is the buy-rate creep signal. Accessorial Recovery % is the headline leakage metric: paid versus billed-back, where anything well under full recovery is margin walking out the door. Accessorial Leakage $ turns that rate into the actual unrecovered dollars, and ranking it by customer tells you which shippers' accessorials you're routinely absorbing.
Why the data is trapped
This is the classic two-system problem. The accessorial paid to the carrier is in the TMS carrier-settlement record (McLeod, Tai, AscendTMS, Aljex); whether it was billed back to the customer lives in the customer invoice — often in QuickBooks. No single screen shows paid-versus-recovered side by side, so leakage hides in the seam between carrier settlement and customer billing. This template joins both sides and computes recovery and leakage directly.
How to read it
Watch the carrier-cost-percent trend for creep — a steady climb means buy rates are outpacing your sell rates. Then go to recovery: an Accessorial Recovery % well below full means real money is leaking, and the by-type and by-customer breakdowns tell you where. Detention and lumper fees are the usual culprits; a customer that consistently shows up in the leakage ranking is one whose contract or billing process needs a fix. The sample on this page uses entirely synthetic data — generic labels and made-up dollar figures, no real loads, carriers, or customers.
Metrics it tracks
| Metric | What it means |
|---|---|
| Total Carrier Cost | Carrier linehaul plus accessorials paid to carriers, summed across all loads. |
| Total Accessorial Cost | Accessorials paid to carriers — detention, lumper, layover, tarp, TONU. |
| Accessorial Recovery % | Accessorials billed to customers ÷ accessorials paid to carriers (SUM/SUM) — the share passed through to shippers. |
| Accessorial Leakage $ | Accessorials paid to carriers minus accessorials billed to customers — the unrecovered dollars. |
| Carrier Cost % of Revenue | Total carrier cost ÷ total revenue (SUM/SUM) — the buy-rate share that drives margin. |
| Loads with Accessorials | Count of loads that incurred any accessorial charge. |
Used by: Operations managers, controllers
Frequently asked questions
What are accessorials in freight brokerage?
Accessorials are charges beyond linehaul — detention, lumper fees, layover, tarping, truck-ordered-not-used (TONU). They're paid to the carrier and are supposed to be billed back to the shipper. When they aren't fully recovered, the unbilled portion comes straight out of a thin brokerage margin, which is why accessorial recovery is worth tracking.
What is accessorial leakage?
It's the gap between what you pay carriers in accessorials and what you bill back to customers — the unrecovered dollars. Even a partial recovery shortfall adds up on a 12–18% margin, and ranking leakage by customer and by accessorial type shows exactly where the money is escaping.
Can I build this on my own carrier-cost data?
Yes. Export carrier settlements (linehaul and accessorials) from your TMS and the matching customer invoices from QuickBooks, and use this as a template — we model it into a Power BI report. The sample uses synthetic data, so there are no real carriers or costs in what you see here.
Build this report on your own data
Clone this Freight brokerages template — describe it and we’ll generate sample data so you can try it free, or upload your own export. You get a fully modeled, branded Power BI project that opens in Power BI Desktop.
Use this as a template →