Logistics and supply chain glossary

Freight vocabulary is not decoration. The word you use for a leg decides which rate applies to it. The word you use for a delay decides who is charged for it, and under whose tariff. The word on the paperwork decides who has to sign, and therefore who holds the record when something goes wrong. Two operators can describe the same waiting trailer in different words and bill each other differently for it.

The entries below are the road-freight terms that turn up where money changes hands: on a rate confirmation before the load moves, on an invoice line nobody recognises afterwards, in the notes on a delivery that went sideways. Each answers the term in a sentence or two, shows it in an operation rather than a textbook, and links to the Shyftbase module where the concept stops being vocabulary and becomes a field somebody has to fill in.

Start from the artefact in your hand

You usually arrive at a glossary holding something specific rather than looking for a topic. Sort by the artefact and the reading order picks itself.

• A rate confirmation you are about to accept. What a rate confirmation commits you to is the rate, the equipment and the terms. What it usually does not spell out is everything billable on top of the line rate, which travels under accessorial charges.
• An invoice line you did not expect. Waiting time arrives under two different names depending on where the waiting happened: detention charges and demurrage charges. The section below separates them, because the difference is what decides who owes whom.
• A leg you have to name in a system. A drayage move between a terminal and an inland facility, local cartage inside a city, line haul between two points in the network, the backhaul load that pays for a return trip, and the deadhead miles that do not.
• A party you have to identify. The consignee is the receiver named on the bill of lading; a 3PL runs the operation you outsourced, and a 4PL directs the providers who run it.
• A question about the plan or the shipment. Route optimization decides the sequence, track and trace reports what the sequence actually did, a cross-dock transfer removes the storage step in the middle, and reverse logistics covers everything moving back the other way.

Detention and demurrage: two charges, two clocks

Both bill you for time. They are not the same charge, they do not run on the same clock, and they are not always billed by the same party.

Demurrage runs while the cargo is still inside the facility holding it — a marine terminal or a rail ramp — and has stayed beyond the free time allowed there. Detention runs on the carrier's equipment, and the driver with it, held beyond the loading or unloading time that was agreed — usually outside the terminal, at a shipper's or receiver's dock. One clock is about where the freight is sitting. The other is about how long you kept somebody else's truck.

What makes either charge hard to settle is not the principle but the evidence. The claim is written from the carrier's own arrival and departure times, and unless the receiving site recorded its own there is nothing to check it against: a signed bill of lading establishes the day, not the minute the vehicle reached the gate or the minute it left. The argument is then about whose recollection counts.

That puts the fix upstream of the invoice: capture arrival and departure where the waiting happens — one of the jobs a track and trace record does — and carry those timestamps into billing rather than reconstructing them two weeks later. Shyftbase bills from completed services against each contract's own rate table and holds reconciliation and dispute workflows in the same place, so automated freight billing either evidences an accessorial or gives you the grounds to drop it.

Naming the leg, and why the name matters

The legs carry separate names because they price differently, fail differently, and need different things recorded against them.

Drayage is the short containerised move between a port or rail terminal and an inland facility. It is the leg where the terminal's clock and the carrier's clock both run, which is why one drayage move can attract both charges.

Cartage is local movement inside a city or region: short, repetitive, and measured in stops rather than distance.

Line haul is the long leg between two points in the network, and the one that most looks like a single number on a rate sheet — one origin, one destination, one trailer.

Backhaul and deadhead are the same return trip with and without freight on it. The gap between them is where the margin on a return leg lives, and closing it is a planning problem rather than a pricing one: whether a load exists in the right place, at the right hour, to be collected on the way home.

Cross-docking is the leg you delete. Inbound freight moves across the dock to an outbound vehicle instead of into storage, which removes handling and holding — and removes the buffer that would otherwise have absorbed a late inbound truck.

Naming the leg is not a labelling exercise: each name implies a different record. A drayage move needs the container, the terminal appointment and the day the charges start. A cartage run needs the stop list and each stop's window. A line haul needs the trailer, the departure and the receiving hub. Shyftbase divides the platform along the same seams: mid-mile planning for the legs between facilities, last-mile delivery for the leg with a customer at the end, and route optimization software for the sequence inside a day. What that sequencing is worth is worked through in what AI routing actually saves.

Who is on the paperwork

Three of these terms describe parties rather than movements, and they are the ones that decide who you call when a delivery fails.

The bill of lading is the document the freight travels under: the carrier's receipt for the goods and the contract of carriage, naming the consignee, the receiving party the carrier is obliged to deliver to. It is also the document a dispute has to return to, which is why what it does and does not record is worth knowing before you need it.

A 3PL takes over an operation — the trucks, the warehouse, the people, or some combination — and performs it under contract. A 4PL sits a level above that: it does not own the assets, it directs the providers who do. The distinction matters at exactly one moment, and it is the moment something goes wrong, because it decides whether the person on the phone can move a truck or can only ask somebody else to move one.

The practical consequence is about records. Every party in that chain holds part of the shipment's history, and the parts only add up if they are kept against one shipment rather than in four systems that each know a fragment. That single view across hubs, providers and routes is what multi-hub network management is for.

The limits of a glossary

The contract outranks the dictionary. How much free time you get, what counts as an accessorial, when detention starts and at what rate — those are set by the rate confirmation, the carrier's tariff or the master agreement, not by any definition here. Where the two disagree, the paperwork wins. A definition is useful for knowing which paperwork to go and read.

The words move with the mode. These entries are written for road freight. In ocean, air and rail the same words carry different mechanics and different governing rules, and a term defined for a truck at a dock will mislead you if you apply it unchanged to a container on the water.

This is not the whole vocabulary. The terms here are the ones that touch how a delivery operation is planned, executed and billed. Customs and trade compliance, ocean documentation and warehouse automation are not defined here; for those, a customs broker or the governing tariff beats a vendor's glossary.

A definition is not an implementation. The module link on a term page says where the concept becomes a field somebody fills in. It does not mean the word carries a special meaning inside the product: where a term has both an industry and a product meaning, the industry meaning is the one written here.