Finding your way around

The sidebar

Everything starts from the sidebar on the left. It is grouped into sections — Reporting, CRM, Quotations, Account Payable, Configuration, Agents Management, Shipping, Storage Areas, Transportation, Finance, Exceptions, Admin — with Settings and Logout pinned at the bottom.

The landing page itself is deliberately bare. Cargolake has no summary dashboard; you pick a module from the sidebar and work there.

Why your menu looks different from a colleague's

The sidebar is filtered by permission. Each entry is tied to something you are allowed to do; if you are not allowed to do it, the entry is hidden, and if every entry in a section is hidden, the whole section disappears.

So an empty-looking menu is almost always a permissions question, not a fault. Two consequences worth knowing:

• A colleague's instructions may not match your screen. If someone says "go to Finance → Journals" and you have no Finance section, you do not have that permission.
• New permissions need a fresh sign-in. The permission list is cached in your browser when you log in. After an administrator changes your roles, sign out and back in before deciding it did not work.

The menu itself is configured centrally rather than built into each screen, so entries can be added or renamed without your application being updated.

List pages

Most modules open on a list — shipments, invoices, companies. They share the same behaviour:

• Search matches on text fields. It is a plain "contains" match, not fuzzy: searching ACME finds ACME Ltd and Global ACME, but a typo finds nothing.
• Filters narrow the list by specific fields such as status or type.
• Paging moves through results a page at a time. Very deep paging on large lists gets slower the further in you go.
• Row actions — view, edit, and module-specific actions — sit at the end of each row.

Forms

Forms validate as you submit, and errors appear under the field they belong to. A few conventions repeat everywhere:

• Required fields block submission until filled.
• Dependent fields only appear once their parent is chosen. Phone fields, for instance, stay hidden until you pick a country, then require the country's dialling code — pick Egypt and the phone number must begin +20.
• Lookup fields search as you type against live data (customers, ports, accounts). If what you need is not in the list, it usually has to be created in its own module first — see Catalog.
• Cancel discards. There are no draft autosaves.

Getting back

Detail pages have a Back button in the top-right corner. Browser back also works, but on a half-completed form it discards what you typed.

Last updated 9 September 2026