How Pilotage Billing Works: Tariffs, Gross Tonnage, Draft, and Detention

The dispatch side of a pilots association gets the attention — the board, the AIS, the boarding. But the association is also a business, and the business runs on the tariff: how each transit converts into an invoice, how those invoices age into receivables, and how reliably the money that was earned actually gets collected. Pilotage billing has its own logic, and a surprising amount of revenue leaks through the gaps in a manual process.

Pilotage doesn't bill by the hour

The first thing operators from other parts of the industry get wrong: pilotage is generally not billed by time. The fee is set by a published tariff — a schedule, often filed with a state pilotage authority — that converts the size of the ship into a charge. The usual drivers:

• Gross tonnage (GT). The headline variable. Tariffs typically have a base charge plus an amount per unit of GT, so a 90,000 GT bulker pays far more than a 5,000 GT coaster for the same passage.
• Draft. Many tariffs add a charge per foot or meter of draft above a threshold, reflecting the greater skill and risk of deep-draft transits.
• Distance or zone. Some districts charge by the leg or by zones transited.
• Minimum charge. A floor so small vessels still cover the cost of turning out a pilot and boat.

The output is a deterministic number: feed the tariff the ship's GT and draft and it returns the pilotage fee. Because it is formulaic, it is also easy to get slightly wrong by hand — and slightly wrong, every transit, adds up.

Then come the add-ons

The base pilotage fee is rarely the whole invoice. Two common additions:

• Detention / standby. When a pilot is held — the berth is not ready, the ship is delayed, fog closes the bar — that time is billable, usually at a standby rate per hour. This is some of the most commonly under-billed revenue in the business, because the standby clock starts during a chaotic moment and nobody writes it down.
• Cancellation and turn-out fees. A pilot dispatched and then stood down still cost the association a turn-out.

If detention and standby are captured by memory after the fact, they are captured incompletely. If they are started and stopped against the live transit, they are captured in full.

The invoice has to tie back to the transit

This is the part a generic accounting package cannot do on its own. A pilotage invoice should reconcile, line by line, to a transit: which vessel, which pilot, the times, the draft and GT used, the tariff applied, and any standby accrued. When that linkage is tight:

• Disputes are resolved by pointing at the record, not relitigating the night.
• The monthly ops report and the receivables ledger agree with each other.
• An export to your accounting system (QuickBooks and the like) carries clean, itemized data rather than a hand-typed lump sum.

When the linkage is loose — a tariff computed on a calculator, an invoice typed in a separate system, standby remembered or not — money leaks at every step.

Where manual billing leaks

The recurring failure modes:

1. Standby never billed, because no one started a clock when the ship was delayed.
2. Tariff arithmetic errors, small and systematic, on GT or draft thresholds.
3. Aging invisible, so a 90-day-overdue invoice looks the same as a fresh one until someone manually ages the book.
4. Partial payments untracked, leaving the real outstanding balance unknown.
5. Re-keying the same transit into a calculator, an invoice template, and an accounting package — three chances to diverge.

How Binnacle Passage closes the gaps

Binnacle Passage treats billing as the downstream end of the transit, not a separate chore:

• A configurable tariff (base + per-GT + per-draft + minimum) computes the fee from the transit's own GT and draft — no separate calculator.
• Detention/standby is a clock you start and stop against the active transit, with the accrued hours × rate added to the invoice and audit-logged.
• A receivables view ages invoices into buckets, supports partial payments that auto-advance status, and shows balance-based aging.
• A QuickBooks-format export carries the itemized invoice out cleanly, so the accounting system isn't a re-keying step.

The result is that the money earned on the water is the money that shows up on the books — because the invoice was the transit all along.

The bottom line

Pilotage billing is tariff-driven, not hourly; the base fee is only part of the invoice; and the whole thing has to reconcile to the transit or revenue leaks. An association that captures standby in real time, computes the tariff from the transit, and ages its receivables honestly collects materially more of what it earns than one running the same volume on a calculator and a memory. For the dispatch side that feeds all of this, see our guide to pilot dispatch software.

This article is informational and is not tax, accounting, or legal advice. Tariffs are set by your pilotage authority and local agreements.