A sealed bag arrives and nobody knows what is in it
An international exchange office receives its work in bags. A sealed receptacle lands from a foreign origin carrying a seal number, a dispatch identifier and a declared weight written by somebody in another country. Inside are parcels and letters that have not yet been counted, cleared or priced. Everything the office does for the next few days is the work of turning that unopened bag into individually tracked items, each with a customs status, a location and a person waiting for it.
Nama ERP covers that chain document by document, from the receipt of the
receptacle to the invoice signed at the recipient’s door. It is part of the
same Freight Management licence — the same frm code and the same menu as
the forwarding side — so it is not a separate purchase, and the two halves
share the master files without sharing documents.
Receptacles come first, items come second
The receptacles receipt is the entry point. Each bag is recorded with its identifier, seal number, dispatch reference, mail subclass and country of origin, along with the number of items it is supposed to contain. Two weights are captured side by side: the declared figure from the dispatch paperwork and the weight actually measured on arrival. The difference is computed per receptacle and again for the whole document.
That variance is the first control in the chain and the cheapest one to run. A bag that arrives lighter than declared has lost something, and the discrepancy is on record before anyone has opened it.
Items subject to customs control are gathered into a manifest for custody — classes, HS codes, declared values and countries of origin arranged the way customs needs them for release of inbound mail. Outbound bags travel the reverse route: a transfer document dispatches receptacles on their route schedule to the next office or out of the network, which closes the tracking loop on the transport unit.
From transport unit to delivery unit
When a bag is opened, the mail item manifest records what was inside — one line per item, with its identifier, class, category and subclass, HS code, declared and actual weight, country of origin, recipient and declared value. This is the point at which the postal inventory comes into existence, and every later document works on it.
Items then move. A transfer sends a batch from the receiving office to the office responsible for the last mile, updating where each one sits and leaving a trail behind it. An adjustment corrects what was recorded wrongly — a weight, a classification, a revised HS code, a miscount — without unwinding the documents that came before it. A periodic stock take empties the store for a physical count and re-stores it, so what is on the shelves and what is in the system are reconciled rather than assumed. And items that cannot go out yet — held for customs, held for a security check, held because nobody can reach the recipient — are recorded on a retention document against a retention reason and followed until they are released, returned or destroyed.
Sorting is the richest document of the group. It lists the items being sorted for delivery, sets the count expected from the receptacle against the count actually present, and highlights the gap; it names the items missing from a short bag; it attaches a non-delivery reason and the measure taken for anything that cannot go out; and it captures both the employee’s and the client’s signature as proof of what was handed over.
Delivering it, and charging for it
The last stage carries two documents. A delivery request fixes the operational facts — the customer, the address and phone number, the delivery area, the delivery and due dates, the service lines being charged, and payment lines for cash collected at the door. The delivery invoice then books the value in accounting: the delivery service itself plus the customs fees the office fronted on the recipient’s behalf. Both are treated as tax authority documents and go out electronically.
Pricing sits on two small master files. A delivery service item is the thing you sell — standard, express, a customs charge — and a price table ties it to an amount, usually keyed by delivery area, so a distant address prices itself without anyone consulting a table on the wall. When an attempt fails because the recipient was out, the address was wrong or the parcel was refused, the reason and the measure are recorded and the item goes back to sorting for another run or into retention.
Reading further
The vocabulary — mail item, receptacle, exchange office, receipt and delivery area — is set out in the postal system overview, the manifest, transfer, retention and sorting documents in mail items, and the request, invoice and pricing files in delivery service.
The forwarding half of the same licence — operation orders, bills of lading and service markups — is described under freight management.
