Your truck sat at an RDC for two and a half hours. The driver did everything right — arrived on the slot, waited while the goods-in queue crawled, got a scribbled "waited 2.5 hrs" on the delivery note. And three weeks later the charge still never made it onto an invoice.
That's the normal case, not the exception. Waiting time is one of the most commonly earned and least commonly billed charges in UK haulage. A single missed claim is typically worth £150–£240. On thin margins — most general hauliers run at 2–4% net — a handful of those a month is the difference between a good year and a flat one.
Billing it isn't complicated. It fails at specific points, and each one is fixable.
You can't credibly invoice a charge the customer never agreed to. Your rate confirmation or conditions of carriage should state three things: the free period (commonly somewhere between 30 minutes and 2 hours, depending on the work), the hourly rate after it, and what counts as arrival (gate time, not bay time — queuing is waiting too). Standard industry conditions, such as the RHA Conditions of Carriage, include demurrage provisions for exactly this reason; if you work on your own terms, make sure yours do too.
If the customer pushed back on the rate at quote stage, you'd rather know then. Silence at quote stage and a dispute at invoice stage is the worst of both.
A waiting time claim is only as good as its evidence, and the evidence exists for about five minutes: the gatehouse stamp, the arrival and departure times, the note on the POD. What kills claims later is that nobody can prove the truck was actually there for the time claimed.
The strongest position is boring and procedural: driver notes arrival time on the delivery note when the queue starts, notes departure when the trailer doors shut, and gets a signature over it where the site allows. A GPS-stamped photo of the POD taken at the site adds independent proof of where the vehicle was and when — which is precisely the piece a disputing customer can't argue with.
This is where most of the money disappears. The note exists — on paper, in a cab, 200 miles from the office. By the time the paperwork comes home on Friday (or the Friday after), the invoicing run has gone out, and adding a £180 line to a paid invoice means a credit note conversation nobody wants. So it quietly doesn't happen.
The fix is structural, not motivational: the waiting time note needs to reach the office the day it was written. If your drivers already send POD photos over WhatsApp, you're one step from this — the gap is that someone has to read every photo and spot the handwriting in the margin. That's the step worth automating: HaulBot reads each POD as it arrives, flags "waiting time", "shortage" and "damage" notes automatically, and has the charge in your morning CSV before the driver is back on the M6.
A waiting time line with no backup invites a query, and every query costs you weeks. Attach the signed POD showing the times, plus the GPS/timestamp record if you have one. Most disputes end when the evidence arrives with the invoice rather than three emails later — the customer's transport office has its own gate records, and they know what you can prove.
For international work under CMR, note that claims run on short limitation periods — generally one year — so a charge you don't raise promptly is a charge you've written off.
Say you run 15 trucks and genuinely incur waiting time twice a week across the fleet — a conservative figure for anyone doing RDC and FMCG work. At £150–£240 a claim, capturing even half of what you currently miss is worth £600–£1,900 a month. Nothing else in your admin stack has that return, because this isn't new revenue you have to win — it's revenue you've already earned and are declining to collect.
Message a photo of any delivery note — waiting time scribble and all — to HaulBot on WhatsApp. It comes back validated in under a minute, with the handwritten notes read and flagged. No card, no setup, no app.