The business with nothing on the shelf
Ask a freight forwarder what its inventory is and the honest answer is nothing. There is no warehouse, no reorder point, no lot expiring on a rack. What the company owns is a booking on somebody else’s vessel, a relationship with a clearance agent, and a truck it probably hired for the afternoon. It buys ocean freight, customs clearance, inland haulage, a genset to keep a reefer cold, a courier run to move the paperwork — and it sells the same list back to the customer with a margin on top.
That is why filing this work under stock control goes wrong. Every document in an inventory system exists to answer how many are left, and a forwarder never asks that question. Freight Management is a separate module for a reason: its “items” are service items, each classified as ocean freight, clearance, trucking, genset, courier or other, each with its own tax treatment and its own revenue and cost accounts. Nothing in it has a balance.
The operation order is the shipment
One document holds a shipment together, and everything else branches off it. The operation order names the shipper, the consignee, the agent and the notify parties; it records the vessel, the voyage, the carrier’s booking number, the loading, discharge and final-destination ports, the container and its type and count, and — for temperature-controlled cargo — the temperature, humidity and ventilation the box has to hold.
Underneath that header the services are split into their own sections, one per service type. Flags at the top decide which sections appear, so a plain port-to-port booking does not show clearance and trucking grids nobody will fill in. The order tracks its status, records releases, splits off a short shipment, and copies itself for next month’s near-identical booking.
From the same toolbar the order produces the bill of lading, inheriting the parties, ports, vessel and container data, then listing the cargo by container with net and gross weights and CBM. It creates no accounting entry; its job is to be the shipping record and to print correctly.
Buying at one price, selling at another
Margin here is not a number somebody types at the end. Shipping lines reprice every month, route by route and box by box, so the work runs on a monthly cycle. The new rate sheet goes in as a purchase price list, and one button turns the lines you pick into a customer’s quotation: a sales price list with a markup per service type, either a percentage or a fixed amount, such as sixty dollars a container on ocean freight and ten per cent on clearance. An all-in rate is there for customers who want one number. That quotation then prices every booking the customer makes that month: one button on the operation order fills every service line from it, each with its supplier, its cost and its price.
Three kinds of line end up on the bill: services resold with a margin; charges passed on at cost, such as the shipping line’s port charges and official receipts, whose margin is zero by design; and the forwarder’s own fees, which have no supplier at all.
Paying the suppliers, billing the customer
Truckers, brokers and genset suppliers usually bill per shipment, and their purchase invoice is created from the lines ticked on the order. Shipping lines bill a month of shipments at once, so one button collects every line from that carrier not yet invoiced, across all operation orders, onto a single invoice.
Each time the sales invoice is saved, each sale line is matched to its purchase line in the same operation order — same service, currency, quantity, ports and container — so the cost and the difference land on the line itself. Profit is visible per service, not just per shipment, and a purchase line used once cannot count against a second sale. The match reads the supplier invoices already saved, so those go in first.
Where you are an agent, not a principal
A large part of a forwarder’s invoice is not its revenue. The customer pays one figure; part of it passes straight through to the shipping line, and the rest is the commission you actually earned. Sending the gross amount to the tax authority overstates the business.
The module handles this by keeping two sets of lines on the invoice. The operational lines are the ones staff work with — a line per service, per port, per container. The electronic lines are regenerated on every save and consolidated by service item, currency, exchange rate and tax and discount percentages, and those are what goes to the authority. Where a service item names a commission item, the value splits: the pass-through part is sent under the original service, the commission under the commission item, and a setting on the invoice’s term configuration decides whether the pass-through line is sent at all.
Where it stops, and what sits beside it
The module documents shipments and prices them; it does not plan them. Sailing schedules are a reference table the sales desk reads to pick a suitable sailing, not an optimiser. If the conversation is about stock in a warehouse it belongs to inventory management instead.
The international postal system — receptacles, mail items, sorting and last-mile delivery — sits in the same module and menu but carries a licence code of its own, so licensing forwarding does not switch it on. It shares this module’s master files and almost none of its documents.
The operation order screen and its sections are documented in the operation orders guide, the markup mechanics in price lists and markups, and the agent split in e-invoicing for freight.
