Pilotage Tariff Invoicing and Detention Billing: Stop Eating the Standby Time

Every pilots association knows where its money comes from — the transit. Fewer can tell you, line by line, where the money it earned quietly fails to become money it collected. The single biggest leak is not fraud, theft, or bad debt. It is standby time that nobody put on the clock, a tariff computed slightly wrong on a calculator, and invoices that age in the dark. This is a revenue problem dressed up as a paperwork problem, and it is fixable.

The tariff is a formula, not a guess

Pilotage does not bill by the hour. It bills by a published tariff — a fee schedule, usually filed with the state pilotage authority or commission — that converts the size of the ship into a charge. The structure is consistent across most US districts even when the numbers differ:

• A base charge per pilotage act or per movement.
• A per-gross-ton component. Gross tonnage (GT) is the headline variable, so a 95,000 GT VLCC pays an order of magnitude more than a 4,000 GT coastal feeder for the same water.
• A per-meter (or per-foot) of draft component, often above a threshold, reflecting the greater skill, slower margins, and higher risk of a deep-draft transit where under-keel clearance is measured in centimeters.
• A minimum charge that floors the whole calculation, so turning out a pilot and a boat for a small vessel still covers the cost of the turn-out.

The output is deterministic: feed the tariff a vessel's GT and draft and it returns the pilotage fee. Because it is formulaic, it is also easy to get slightly wrong by hand — a misread draft mark, a GT off by a thousand, a draft threshold applied one tier too low. Slightly wrong, every transit, for a year, is real money. If your dispatchers or office staff are running the schedule on a desk calculator, that is the first place to look. Our free pilotage tariff calculator lets you sanity-check the math against your own filed schedule, but a calculator a human re-runs by hand is still a manual step — and every manual step is a place to diverge.

The standby clock you are not starting

Here is the line that bleeds the most: detention and standby.

When a pilot is held — the berth is not ready, the agent's paperwork is late, fog or wind closes the bar, the tug is not alongside, the previous vessel has not cleared — that time is billable. Most filed tariffs carry a detention rate or standby rate per hour (frequently with the first portion of an hour rounded up, and a grace period defined in the schedule). It exists precisely because a pilot held on a vessel or held ashore waiting on a tide window is a pilot you cannot dispatch elsewhere. The association is bearing a real cost. The tariff says you are entitled to recover it.

And associations eat it constantly. The reason is structural, not careless: the standby clock starts during the single most chaotic moment of the job. The dispatcher is working three vessels, a pilot is on the radio, the weather is turning. Nobody opens a spreadsheet to note that the Maersk whatever went on standby at 0347 because the berth crane fouled. By the time the transit is billed days later, the standby is reconstructed from memory — which means it is reconstructed low, or not at all. You round down because you are not certain, and the agent will dispute anything you cannot prove.

Two related charges leak the same way:

• Cancellation and turn-out fees. A pilot dispatched and then stood down still consumed a turn-out and a boat run. The tariff almost always provides for it; the office almost always forgets to bill it.
• Boat and launch surcharges where the schedule itemizes them separately from the pilotage act.

The fix is not discipline. Discipline fails under load — that is the whole point of load. The fix is a clock that lives on the live transit, that a dispatcher starts and stops with one action against the vessel already on the board, and that accrues hours automatically into the invoice with an audit-logged start and stop time. Captured live, standby is captured in full. Captured from memory, it is captured at a discount you grant your own customer.

Tie every charge back to the transit

This is the part a generic accounting package cannot do on its own, and it is the difference between an invoice you can defend and an invoice you can only assert. A pilotage invoice should reconcile, line by line, to a transit record:

• Which vessel, IMO and GT and draft as used in the calculation.
• Which pilot, with boarding and disembarking times.
• The tariff version applied and each component that produced the fee.
• Standby accrued, with the start and stop timestamps.
• Any turn-out, cancellation, or boat surcharge, with the reason.

When that linkage is tight, three good things happen. Disputes get resolved by pointing at the record instead of relitigating a 0300 movement nobody remembers the same way. The monthly operations report and the receivables ledger agree with each other, because they are drawing from one source. And the export to your accounting system carries clean, itemized data rather than a hand-typed lump sum that hides what it is made of. The transit is the invoice; the invoice is just the transit, priced.

When the linkage is loose — tariff on a calculator, invoice typed in a separate template, standby remembered or not, the whole thing re-keyed into QuickBooks — money leaks at every handoff, and you have nothing to point at when the agent pushes back.

Receivables: aging you can actually see

Earning the fee and collecting it are different problems. Pilotage receivables have their own rhythm: vessel agents pay on their own cycle, some disputes are legitimate, and a 90-day-overdue invoice looks identical to a fresh one in a flat list. The failure modes are predictable:

1. Aging invisible. Nobody ages the book until someone manually ages the book, so slow-pay agents are not flagged until the balance is large.
2. Partial payments untracked. An agent pays most of an invoice and disputes the standby line; if the system cannot record a partial and re-age the remainder, the true outstanding balance is unknown.
3. No follow-up trigger. Invoices that cross 30, 60, 90 days should surface themselves. If they don't, collection depends on whoever happens to remember.

A receivables view that buckets invoices by age, accepts partial payments that auto-advance status, and shows balance-based aging turns collection from a memory exercise into a worklist. You call the agent who is at 75 days because the screen put them at the top, not because you stumbled across the invoice.

Where the leaks add up

Run the arithmetic on your own book. If you are eating two hours of un-billed standby on even one transit a week at a typical detention rate, that is a five-figure annual leak from a single recurring miss — before you count tariff arithmetic errors, forgotten turn-out fees, and slow receivables you never chased. None of it requires more volume to fix. It requires capturing what already happened.

How Binnacle Passage closes the gaps

Binnacle Passage is dispatch software built specifically for US licensed marine pilots associations, and it treats billing as the downstream end of the transit rather than a separate chore in a separate system:

• A configurable tariff — base plus per-GT plus per-draft, floored at a minimum — computes the fee directly from the transit's own GT and draft. No separate calculator, no re-keying, no transcription error.
• A standby clock the dispatcher starts and stops against the active transit, with accrued hours times the detention rate added to the invoice and the start and stop timestamps audit-logged for any dispute.
• Per-transit invoices that reconcile line by line to the transit record — vessel, pilot, times, tariff components, standby.
• A receivables view that ages invoices into buckets, supports partial payments that auto-advance status, and shows balance-based aging.
• A QuickBooks-format export so your accountant gets clean, itemized data instead of a hand-typed lump sum.

Because the same board already runs your live operation — coverage-zone AIS, current-aware ETAs to the boarding area, under-keel clearance for the deep-draft jobs — the billing is not bolted on. It is the natural close-out of a transit the system already recorded. The tooling for the timing side feeds the tooling for the money side: the same record that gave you a tide window for the boarding decision becomes the record that prices the standby when the window slips.

This is the same operational thinking we apply district by district — see how it plays out in hard water in our Cook Inlet pilotage dispatch write-up, where tide timing and billable standby are two sides of the same transit.

The bottom line

Pilotage billing is tariff-driven, not hourly. The base fee is only part of the invoice. Detention and standby are the most under-billed revenue in the business, and they leak for a structural reason — the clock starts during the worst moment of the night — that no amount of resolve will fix. An association that captures standby in real time, computes the tariff from the transit, ages its receivables honestly, and exports clean data collects materially more of what it already earned than one running the same volume on a calculator and a good memory. You did the work on the water. Bill for all of it.

Want to see how the board, the tariff, and the standby clock fit together? Explore Binnacle Passage, or see a live pilot board and watch a transit turn into an invoice.

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