Freight Forwarding

01

The chargeable weight, with the rule shown

Air at 1:6000, courier at 1:5000, sea LCL at one cubic metre to the tonne, road at 1:3000 — your own divisors if your carrier contract says otherwise. Every figure comes with the sentence that produced it, so the customer who queries it gets an answer instead of an argument.

02

Three answers to one question

"What does it cost to bring twelve cubic metres from Ningbo?" is three questions. Price LCL, FCL and air on the same enquiry, each with its own transit time, its own chargeable weight and its own margin, and let the customer choose. One click turns the accepted option into a job file with its charges already on it.

03

A disbursement is not revenue

Duty, import tax and port dues are the importer's money passing through your bank account. They are paid on a bill, recovered at cost, and kept out of revenue and out of margin — so a six per cent job reads as six per cent instead of forty.

04

Master and house, modelled properly

A consolidation is a master job with house jobs under it, each with its own customer, its own house bill and its own profit and loss. The master's cargo is the sum of its houses and the manifest prints itself. Co-load, part-shipment and the agent's share of the profit are all in the model, not in a note on the file.

05

Al Nadeeb, duty and the bond

Declaration header and lines with the tariff code, the customs value worked out as CIF and duty charged on it in the GCC order, exemptions, the single-window reference, the clearance milestones, and the bank guarantee nobody claims back until something lists it.

06

Estimate against actual, on one line

The estimate is made at quote time; the carrier's invoice arrives six weeks later. Both sit on the same charge line, so "did that job make what we said it would" has an answer — by job, by customer, by lane, by charge code — and the work in progress is accrued to the ledger when the file closes.

07

The agent on both sides of the book

Your counterparty abroad owes you for what you nominated and you owe them for what they nominated. One period statement nets the two, matches their figures against yours job by job, and holds every difference for someone to explain rather than rounding it away.

08

Landed cost, back onto the stock

For a trading customer the freight, the duty and the handling are spread back over the goods by value, weight, volume or quantity, lifting the moving-average cost of each product. That is what makes this one system rather than a freight island beside an ERP.