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, and each line carries both what the shipment costs you and what you are charging for it. 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 own status through the journey, releases can be recorded, a short shipment handles what did not travel, and a near-identical booking next month is a copy of the last one rather than an hour of retyping.
From the same toolbar the order produces the bill of lading — the document that proves the carrier took the goods and on what terms. It inherits the parties, ports, vessel and container data, then lists the cargo line by line with container numbers, net and gross weights and CBM. It creates no accounting entry of its own; 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. Purchase price lists record what each supplier charges, by service, validity period and currency. Sales price lists build on top of them with a markup per service type — a percentage, a fixed amount, or both together — so ocean freight can run at cost plus ten per cent while clearance runs at cost plus a flat fee, and an all-in rate is available for customers who want one number. One button on the operation order pulls the matching prices from both lists, matched on customer, commodity, ports and container, and fills every service line at once.
When the sales invoice is posted, each sale line is matched back to its purchase line in the same operation order — same service item, currency, quantity, ports, container, commodity — so the cost and the difference land on the line itself. Profit is visible per service, not just per shipment, and a purchase line is marked as used so it cannot be counted against a second sale.
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 posting 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 same licence also covers the international postal system — receptacles, mail items, sorting and last-mile delivery — which shares this module’s menu but 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.
