CHARTERS - Charters Maintenance/Enquiry
See Also
What is CHARTERS
CHARTERS 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 (time sheet) calculations and voyage analysis (WIPSUM) are other applications. The vessel database is maintained separately in VESSEL.
The assignment of TRADE records to a charter is handled by use of any of the 3 specialist processes:-
a) mouse right click /Create Bulk assignments. The filtering and grid processing also allows allocation and thereby the creation of internal contracts (to handle inter departmental buy/sell).
b) on the Contracts page, individual TRADE records can be assigned by use of filter button and simple data entry
c) on the Charter Party page, there is a button ‘reorganise shipments’. This is a pictorial presentation of the current CHARTER assignments and 2 windows for unassigned Purchases and Sales. The assignments window is organized in sections of Destination/Product/LoadPort with drag and drop enabled for new assignments and returning existing assignments to the unassigned pool.
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 and stevedoring activity, and the entry/calculation/report of Laytime Demurrage/Despatch notices (Time sheets).
When creating a new charter/nomination/folio... you can either enter your own coding or click 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 (e.g. Charters that 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(Charter) accounts 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.
Time Sheets
When a Load Port or Discharge Port has been setup on the Charter Party page, the user can click the Time Sheets button on the respective row to open a form for maintenance of primary Port data e.g. laytime, cadence, dates for Operation start/end. Other important information to be completed is the demurrage and despatch currency/rates. When the minimum data entries have been completed and saved, the user clicks the tool bar icon Time Used. This enables a form for entry of the time sheet details. All the minutes between the operations start and end date/times must be accounted i.e. each row with time entered as international clock will be continuous and the user is warned if they try to exit without completion of all time sheet entries. The screen view shows total time spent/saved-lost and the calculation of demurrage or despatch. The print icon produces a simple review of these entries/results which can then be used to notify/agree with the Owner and for entry of any TRADE estimates and accounting provisions.
Note1. TRADE costs can be setup using [update] button which will allocate the DEM/DES calculated cost across all the Purchase contracts, using tonnage to pro-rata the value. DEMurrage is a cost payable and DESPatch is a cost receivable.
Note2: There are NO automatic accounting documents produced in ITAS but Invoices can be produced using DOCDES forms and user entry of Counter Party and dates.
Note3: See help? on both forms to ascertain data entry requirements.
K01 / Run Mode 2