Landed cost tracking software, every expense traced to email

Landed cost tracking software should answer one question: what did this container cost me, and where did each number come from? Docket answers it from your mailbox. Every charge on a shipment carries the email it arrived in, with the sender, the date and the attachment attached to the line. Open the cost, see the proof.

That second half is the part most tools skip.

Why does landed cost go wrong on an import desk?

Not because anyone is careless. Because the costs do not arrive together.

The goods invoice comes from the supplier at contract time. Freight comes from the forwarder, sometimes twice, once as a quote and once as the real thing. Insurance comes from the broker. Duty comes out of the broker’s working sheet. The delivery order fee shows up on a separate note from the shipping line. Transport arrives last, often weeks after the box has been emptied.

Six or seven senders, none of whom agrees on how to name your shipment. One says the BL number. One says the invoice number. One says “your consignment”. A person on your desk reads each mail, decides which container it belongs to, and types it into a sheet.

That typing is not free. Payment tracking runs 10 to 15 minutes per container. That sits on top of supplier follow-ups at 30 to 45 minutes, doc-pack prep and checking at 45 to 90 minutes, and status tracking and reporting at 20 to 30 minutes. The whole container takes about 2.2 hours of desk work, with a range of 2 to 2.5.

Now multiply. A 500-container desk burns roughly 1,100 hours a month. Seven people at about 176 hours each gives 1,232 hours of capacity. The desk is at about 90 per cent capacity on grunt work before anyone buys or sells anything.

What does “traced to the email” mean in practice?

It means the cost line and its evidence are the same object.

Docket reads the mailbox the desk already uses. A charge lands, and Docket matches it to the shipment using what is in the mail and the attachment: the BL, the contract, the container numbers, the party names it already knows from your masters. The charge is posted against that shipment. The message stays with it.

Six months later, when a supplier says the freight was quoted lower, or an auditor asks why one container carried $600 of extra fees, nobody goes searching. The line opens, the mail is under it, the attachment is under the mail.

Here is what the difference looks like on the same charge.

The right-hand column is the whole product argument. Every trade ERP, CTRM and document tool on the market records what already happened. Docket does the work that produces the record.

How does Docket know which shipment an invoice belongs to?

From what it already holds.

The purchase contract and the sales contract come in first on a Docket desk. That gives Docket the parties, the goods, the quantity, the incoterm, the port pair and the terms. The doc-pack adds the bill of lading number, the container and seal numbers and the invoice number. The masters carry your suppliers, your forwarders, your customs brokers and the way each of them writes your name.

So when a mail arrives from a forwarder with a subject line that says nothing useful and a PDF attached, Docket has half a dozen ways to place it. Container number in the PDF. BL number in the body. Sender matched to a forwarder already working that lane for you. Amount consistent with the quote on that shipment.

Where the match is not clean, Docket says the match is not clean and asks. A charge posted to the wrong container is worse than a charge sitting in a queue for a day, because the first one quietly corrupts two shipments and the second one costs somebody thirty seconds.

What costs are included in the landed cost?

• The goods value from the purchase contract, which Docket already has because the contract is where a shipment starts.
• Ocean freight, as invoiced by the forwarder, with the quote alongside it when a quote came first.
• Insurance, as invoiced by the broker.
• Customs duty and clearance charges from the broker’s working sheet.
• Delivery order and terminal charges from the line.
• Inland transport.
• Demurrage and detention, if the two clocks went the wrong way.

That last line is the one traders care about most, and it is the one that arrives latest. Two clocks race on every shipment: port free time against your paperwork. About 8 days of lateness is typical. A week of demurrage on one container runs about US$12,000. One missed doc-pack a month works out at US$1,000 to $2,000 an event, so US$12,000 to $24,000 a year.

When that charge is traced to the email chain that produced it, the argument with the line, the forwarder or the supplier stops being a memory contest.

How do you calculate landed cost?

Add the goods value to every cost above that is not recoverable, and divide by the units or the containers you are costing. The arithmetic is a sum; the two judgements inside it are what move the answer. The duty base is not settled internationally — the WTO Valuation Agreement leaves CIF against FOB to each member, so the same cargo carries a different duty base in Singapore and in India. And recoverable import tax does not belong in landed cost at all: GST or VAT you reclaim is cash out on a date, not a cost of the goods, and putting it in overstates every margin downstream of it.

Our landed cost calculator runs the sum with both of those as inputs rather than assumptions, and publishes no duty rate or charge tariff, because yours comes off your own classification and your own invoices. What it cannot do is collect the charge lines — which is the part of the job that is actually late.

Estimated at contract, actual as the invoices land

Every landed cost software page you will read promises the true cost of your goods. The question is when you get it.

Docket sets the expected lines the day the purchase contract is recorded. The incoterm says which charges are yours. The lane says which parties will bill them. Your own history on that lane says roughly what each will come to. Every line is marked as an estimate.

Then the mailbox does the rest. The freight invoice arrives and replaces the freight estimate. The broker’s working sheet arrives and replaces the duty estimate. The delivery order arrives with the line’s charges on it. Each replacement is a reconciliation: the actual against the estimate, with the variance visible on the container the day it lands.

A number you can price against on day one and defend line by line on day forty. Most tools give you one or the other.

Per container first, then per SKU

A landed cost tracking system for an import desk and a landed cost module inside an inventory ERP answer different questions, and the ERP’s question comes second.

The ERP asks what each unit on the container is now worth, so it can value the stock and report the margin per product. To answer it, the ERP spreads the container’s charges across the SKUs on it: by value, by quantity, by weight, by volume, on a rule you choose. That is allocation, and the ERP is the right place for it.

Allocation needs a complete, correct container total to start from. That is the part the ERP cannot produce, because the charges arrive by email from six parties over six weeks and somebody has to find, match and check each one. Docket does that part and hands across the traced total. Per container in Docket, per SKU in your ERP, and the evidence stays attached through both.

How much desk time does this give back?

Be careful with the arithmetic here, because two different rates are in play and mixing them overstates the case.

Docket automates supplier chasing at 85 per cent, doc-pack drafting at 65 per cent, and tracking and reporting at 85 per cent. Blended across all desk work that is about 70 per cent. On the 500-container reference desk, 70 per cent of 1,100 hours is roughly 770 hours a month freed. At a loaded Singapore desk cost of about US$25 an hour, that is US$19,250 of desk time removed. Docket at that volume costs 350 shipments times $6, or US$2,100 a month. Net, about US$17,150 a month and US$205,800 a year.

Money freed minus what Docket costs. That is the only formula on this page.

Read the 770 hours as capacity, not as people. The same seven people handle 1,000 to 1,200 containers instead of 500, or two or three of them move to buying and selling, which is the work that actually makes money. A trading desk grows into freed hours. It does not celebrate an empty chair.

Your desk is leaving ~US$200k/year on the table just to manually type what Docket learns in a month.

What this does not do

Docket reads email. If a charge never arrives by email, and somebody hands over a paper note at the port, Docket will not know about it until that note reaches the mailbox.

Docket does not convert currencies at a rate we invent. Charges stay in the currency they were invoiced in. If you want one number in one currency, you give us the rate you book at.

Docket is not your accounting system. It produces accounting-ready expense records with their evidence attached, and your accountant still runs the ledger.

And the honest one about the numbers. The figures above are an operational baseline, not an industry survey, and the automation rates are what Docket is built to hit rather than a per-customer average. Ask us for a number we do not have and we will say so rather than estimate it — that rule is why the free-time tables on this site are still blank.

Where the landed cost fits with everything else

The purchase contract and the sales contract are where a shipment starts on a Docket desk. Recording them is the first thing a trader does, and every chase, every check, every payment date and every cost line derives from them. Landed cost is what those two contracts look like once the shipment is over.

The same mailbox that produces your costs also produces the payment calendar, because contract terms name the dates. And the same inbound screening that reads a broker’s invoice reads the mail that claims your supplier’s bank account has changed. That is trade fraud screening, and it is running on every message before the cost line is ever written.

What to do with this page

If you run an import desk and you cannot open last quarter’s worst container and see, in one screen, every charge and the mail it came from, that is the gap. Send us the shipment you argued about most last quarter. We will show you what it looks like traced.

Cost per container is not an accounting question. It is the question of whether the trade made money, and you should be able to answer it before the invoices stop arriving.