The vessel sailed on Tuesday night. On Wednesday the final account went to the principal. On Thursday the crane hire invoice arrives and it is higher than the tariff you quoted. On Friday the principal asks why a taxi for eight crew appears twice.
Nothing here was done carelessly. The account was correct with the information on the desk when it was drawn up. That is the problem with a disbursement account: it is finished before the port call is.
It is not a bill, it is evidence
The disbursement account is the agency's account of money spent on the principal's behalf during a port call, together with the agency's own fee. The proforma disbursement account (PDA) goes out before the call as an estimate, usually to get funds in place. The final disbursement account (FDA) goes out after, as the settlement.
A bill asks to be paid. A disbursement account asks to be believed. Every line on it is a claim about something that happened on the quay, often to someone who was never there. Six things each line has to prove:
- That it happened. A service was ordered, delivered and recorded by somebody.
- That it belongs to this call. Not the vessel before it, not the sister ship alongside.
- That the amount is the agreed amount. The tariff, the price list or the supplier's invoice, not a number close to it.
- That it is not already there. The same cost arriving twice, by two routes, is the most common quiet error in agency invoicing.
- That the tax treatment is right. VAT handled the same way every time, whoever drew up the account.
- That it can be reconstructed months later. In a dispute, an audit, or a conversation with a principal who has changed staff.
Miss the sixth and the first five stop mattering. An account nobody can reconstruct is an account you can only defend from memory.
Where the trail breaks
In practice it is rarely the arithmetic. It is the record.
Costs that arrive after the account is closed. The crane was released at 03:00, the invoice comes ten days later, and the settlement went out on day two. Everyone in this trade has written the apologetic email.
The statement of facts and the invoice disagreeing. The statement of facts (SOF) says the vessel was all fast at 14:20. The service was charged from 14:00. Both are defensible on their own; together they invite a question you cannot answer without going back to the person who was there.
A tariff that lives in someone's head. Surcharges after hours, a different rate at the weekend, an agreement made two years ago with one supplier. It works until the person who remembers it is on holiday.
Rounding. Line by line it is cents. Across a call with sixty lines, it is a difference the principal's finance team notices before you do.
What traceable actually means
Not "we keep good records". Traceable means somebody who was not there can follow one line on the account back to the thing that caused it: the order that was placed, the confirmation that came back, the supplier's invoice, and the time in the statement of facts that justifies the hours charged. Without opening a filing cabinet, and without ringing the agent who handled it.
That is the difference between a disbursement account that gets paid and one that gets discussed. And it is why the discipline is not really about invoicing. It is about whether the record was built while the call was happening, or assembled afterwards from what people could remember.
Processing our invoices was time-intensive and manual. With SHIPM8 we have automated and streamlined our invoicing process, minimising the margin of error and allowing us to focus on what really matters: providing high-quality services to our customers in the cruise world.
Alexander Coesel, Manager Logistics and Sales, Felison Cruise Terminal
Where SHIPM8 fits
In SHIPM8 an invoice is built from the records of the call rather than typed alongside them. The invoice details page shows the data an amount was calculated from, so a charge can be traced back to its origin without leaving the screen. Tariffs, price lists and surcharges live in the system rather than in a colleague's memory. VAT is set from the tariff configuration, invoice lines are rounded before the total is calculated, and incoming purchase invoices are checked for duplicates before they are imported. Your principal can see where a request stands through the customer portal, which removes a category of email entirely.
None of that stops a crane invoice arriving late. It does mean the late invoice lands against a file that already knows which vessel, which berth and which hours it belongs to.
If your month-end is spent reconstructing accounts rather than checking them, ask for a demo and we will walk through one of your own port calls.