PORTMAN - Port Agent Boats
What is PORTMAN
PORTMAN is primarily the accounting procedure for the creation and amendment of the WIP ledger that represent a vessel nomination/charter where a collection of buy and sale TRADE contracts are assigned for the tracking/collection of the unrealised P+L and their accounting entries. Other functionality is to maintain information relevant to the Charter e.g. Charter Party and Shipment data. Forms (DOCDES) can be created e.g. Fixtures. Post-fixtures, laytime calculations and voyage analysis (WIPSUM) are other applications. The vessel database is maintained separately in VESSEL.
The assignment (and optional allocation) of TRADE records to a charter is handled by use of a mouse right click feature. The filtering and grid processing allows for re-assignment of contracts from other WIP accounts and the creation of internal contracts (to handle inter departmental buy/sell).
The feature Board-to-Board is used to move TRADE tonnage from one charter to another charter. There are SSU options to use internal contracts for the transfer and whether to create accrual transfer accounting documents.
Enquiries of balances and transactions are available with more sophisticated enquiries using the Trading databases.
The program displays a form with several tabs, one for the maintenance of account profile static codes of commodity, client, etc., another to define the current Vessel shipment status, another for Charter Party data, another to view applied TRADE contract details and their P+L and the others for varied enquiries. A very useful feature in the tabs is the one named 'Contracts' whereby you can view the associated TRADE tonnages that have been assigned to this WIP account, these represent the trading basis for the account and the WIP Management P+L can be viewed.
The Shipment tab handles the maintenance of the status of the charter/shipment. Using this information, mass updating of the contracts traffic status is possible as well as selective updates where there are different loadport or discharge details for specific contracts linked to a charter.
The Charter Party tab enables entry of sufficient detail to produce Fixture Notices, the maintenance of Post fixture detail e.g. Load/Discharge ports and port activity, and the entry/calculation/report of Laytime Demurrage/Despatch notices.
When creating a new charter/nomination/folio... you can either enter your own coding or depress the Ok button for the system to name/code the account (the account code structure will be determined by Hivedome at ITAS setup/installation). To assist in account creation, you can specify that some of the static detail and costings are derived from a TRADE record, i.e. one of the contracts that are to be associated with the charter/shipment. Thereafter any number of trade details can be assigned to the account either from WIP, CHARTERS or TRADE.
When the assignment is complete, you can mark the account as being complete for the purpose of removing the TRADE records from the Forward P+L. Normally this process is not completed until the accounting balances have been liquidated into the realised (PLR) accounts.
Simple reports of account details is handled using the 'Report' icon on the tool bar, which also includes a standard list of WIP account balances. Two forms will have been setup by Hivedome (WIP List and Charters). These can be modified by the user and new styles can be created. A simple report of WIP account balances is also available from ‘Report’ drop-down. There are several styles of presenting WIP transactions; by currency, by Expense code and by Contract Reference. These are all available from standard tabs on the CHARTERS form. More sophisticated reporting for WIP accounts is handled by WIPSUM and WIPLIST.
The WIP Ledger is used to section all accounts that have a contract nature (i.e. have a finite life, are opened, posted-to and closed in a reasonably short time frame) OR are long-term Stock/Inventory units e.g. tanks of oil/soya/sugar which are consistently replenished/sold etc. Contract information (e.g. purchases, sales, freight, insurance, etc) are posted to the WIP Ledger throughout the life of the account, in this way accounting and P+L analysis can be performed for each individual account. Due to their volatility and the amount of information related to the accounts held in WIP, it is convenient to view/ maintain them separated from the Nominal/ General Ledger. WIP contracts are all represented in the Nominal/ General Ledger through a control account that reflects their net balance.