The ship agent job is coordination-heavy and document-heavy. Vessel arrivals, charge logging, vendor payments, principal approvals, FDA reconciliation. Base puts all of it on one record so your agents stop switching between five tools to run a single vessel call. See port agency software for the agency-wide view, or port call software for the port call framing.
These four pain points are what every ship agent runs into by Tuesday afternoon. Base replaces all of them with one shared port call record.
Stop the manual entry errors.
A charge typed into the spreadsheet does not match the vendor receipt. The FDA is off by $400. The principal asks what happened and no one remembers.
Stop patching tools together.
Email for the principal. Spreadsheet for the charges. Accounting for the invoicing. WhatsApp for the agent on scene. Nobody can answer a simple question about a vessel without opening four tools.
Stop waiting on status updates.
Vessel alongside at 14:00, berthing charge known at 14:02, principal finds out at 17:30 when the agent finishes the day. Every status check is an email thread.
Stop the invoicing lag.
PDA sent by email. FDA generated in Word. Invoice typed into QuickBooks. Payment chased by phone. Four tools, no automation, a week of delay per port call.
No rip-and-replace. Base imports your vessel and vendor list, then each week absorbs another piece of the manual work your team is doing today.
Base creates your tenant with your vessels, vendors, and chart of accounts imported. Port call templates mapped to your common service types. Nothing running in production yet.
Your ship agent runs a real vessel call in Base. PDA generated from template. Charges logged from dockside. Principal invited to guest access. Base is now in the workflow for one agent.
All active port calls live in Base. Principal reviewers invited. QuickBooks or Xero sync live. Spreadsheet workflow retired for new calls. Finance reconciliation moves to real time.
Port calls typically close in four days instead of two weeks. Month-end reconciliation drops from a week to a day. Your principals stop asking where their FDA is because they already have it.
Your ship agent opens Base, sees the vessel they are running today, and logs charges, attaches documents, and updates the SOF from dockside. Everything they do attaches to the port call record the principal is watching. No tool-switching, no end-of-day catch-up, no parallel spreadsheet. Works with document generation for PDA and FDA output.
Your accounting system, your document storage, your email. Ship agent software should connect to these, not replace them. If you have to learn a new invoicing tool on top of the ship agency tool, the vendor is doing it wrong.
Your agents run port calls, not software training sessions. The tool has to be faster than the spreadsheet on the busiest day of the month or they will open the spreadsheet instead. Complexity dies in the first week of use.
Agent logs a charge from dockside. Finance sees it within seconds. Principal sees it within seconds. No waiting on a sync batch job or a nightly export. Real time is the whole point.
The PDA and FDA should generate from the port call record, not from a Word template the agent maintains by hand. Every charge on the record lands on the document automatically, with tax and currency handled.
Customs forms, pilot slips, vendor receipts, SOF prints, cargo manifests. All attached to the port call they belong to. Never attached to an email thread that someone else is going to forget to forward.
The tool that works for a single-port agency with five vessels a month has to keep working when you grow to a multi-office network running 500 calls. Base scales without switching products or tearing out data.
Every ship agent wears a finance hat. Charges log against the port call, vendor invoices attach when they arrive, the PDA turns into the FDA, and the FDA syncs to your accounting system with the full cost breakdown intact. No double entry. No end-of-month reconciliation marathon. Per-principal breakdowns flow automatically because each port call already knows which principal it belongs to. See QuickBooks integration and Xero integration for the full field list that syncs.
Charges attach to the port call when they happen. No re-typing into a spreadsheet, no transcription mistakes, no month-end surprises when accounting finds a $400 gap.
Email, spreadsheet, accounting, messaging all collapse into one port call record. The agent opens one tool, not five. Ship agents who switch to Base cut tool-switching time sharply in the first month.
Agent logs a charge. Finance sees it. Principal sees it. Ops sees it. No waiting on a status email that never gets sent because the agent is running three vessels at once.
PDA, FDA, and invoice all generate from the port call record. No re-typing into accounting, no hunting for the vendor receipt, no waiting a week for the principal to approve. Port call to paid in days.
Customs forms, pilot slips, SOF scans, vendor receipts, cargo manifests. Attached to the port call they justify, not buried in an inbox three emails deep.
Start with one agent and five vessels a month. Grow to a multi-office network running 500 calls. Base works for both. Configurable per principal, per office, per workflow.
in port call charges tracked
records synced to accounting
currencies captured per port call
PDAs and FDAs generated
Excel works until the third principal asks a question about a charge you logged two weeks ago. Base replaces the spreadsheet with a live record your whole team reads from, including the principal. Agencies running Base on real port calls cut month-end close from a week to a day.
Agents adopt Base inside a week because the port call template is faster than copying last week’s spreadsheet. The tool has to be faster than the workaround. Most agencies see the longest-tenured agent stop opening the spreadsheet first.
Keep it. Base pushes approved charges to QuickBooks or Xero on FDA approval. Your accountant never logs into Base. Your agents never touch the accounting system. No double entry, no parallel books.
Principals get scoped guest access. They see only their vessels, only their charges, only their approvals. Most principal reviewers are approving line items within ten minutes of their first login. No training, no seat license, no daily check-in.
Bring a real vessel call. One you are prepping for next week, one you just closed, or one that went sideways and you want to replay. We will set up the ship agent workspace, walk you through the PDA to FDA workflow, and show you what the principal sees, live, in your own tenant. No prep required.
Move the port calls, charges, documents, and principal approvals into one workspace your whole team reads from. See Base in a live demo with your own vessels and your own port call workflow.