The other articles describe screens. This one follows a single job all the way through, so you can see where your part fits and who picks it up next.
The example: an importer asks you to bring 12 pallets from Shanghai to Alexandria.
1. The enquiry arrives — CRM
The importer is not yet a customer, so they start as a lead: their contact details, their company's details, and where the enquiry came from.
You call them. That call is logged as an activity with a summary, a conclusion and — the field that earns its keep — the opportunities it revealed.
The business is real, so you qualify the lead. It needs a company name and a VAT ID first; qualification refuses without them, and refuses again if that VAT ID already belongs to an existing company, which usually means they are already a customer under another name.
You now have a company. Set its commercial terms while you are there: payment type, credit limit, terms of payment. Those decide what happens at step 3 and step 7.
→ Working with leads · Companies
2. You price the job — Quotations
Raise a quotation against the company: origin and destination ports, LCL, import, and the cargo — 12 pallets with their dimensions and weights.
If a contract exists for this customer and lane, its rates fill the pricing in. If not, you build it from cost lines — what you will pay the carrier, the agent, the port — and charge lines, what you will bill.
Press Calculate. Check the units before anything else: LCL freight is normally W/M, and quoting CBM on light bulky cargo undercharges it.
→ Creating a quotation · Pricing a quotation
3. The credit check happens — automatically
The importer is on credit terms, so their available balance is checked.
- Enough credit: nothing happens and you carry on.
- Not enough: you get a warning and the quotation routes to the exceptions queue for someone with authority to decide.
This is not an error. Somebody is being asked a commercial question, and they can see the customer's exposure while they answer it.
→ Working the exceptions queue · Company transactions
4. The customer accepts — Quotations
You confirm the quotation, which locks the pricing and sends it to the customer's contacts. They accept.
You process it. The job leaves sales.
5. Operations run it — Shipments
A shipment carries the job: parties, dates, cargo, the vessel and voyage it is booked on.
It moves through its workflow — booked, loaded, sailed, arrived, cleared, delivered — and you move it by running transitions, not by editing fields. That matters: a transition can generate the bill of lading, email the consignee and notify customs in one action. Editing the record by hand skips all of that.
Along the way: containers get their numbers and seals, documents get uploaded into their slots, and actual dates replace estimates as things happen.
If the cargo releases in two parts, split the shipment. If two of your bookings turn out to travel together, merge them — provided they are at the same workflow step.
→ The shipment record · Running a transition · Splitting and merging shipments
6. You bill the customer — Invoices
The charge lines priced back at step 2 become an invoice.
Check three things: that the billing company is right — it is not always the customer — that every line is one you can explain, and that the total is what was quoted. Then print, issue, and submit it to the VAT portal.
7. Suppliers bill you — Expenses
The carrier's invoice arrives. Enter it as a vendor invoice, with one line per shipment — a carrier invoice covering twenty jobs is twenty lines, not one.
Each line claims the matching cost line from the quotation. That is the moment you find out whether your estimate at step 2 was right, and it happens before you pay rather than after.
Port fees paid in cash by a clearance representative come through custody: advance the money, then reconcile the actual spend against receipts.
→ Vendor invoices · Custody payment requests
8. The job's true margin appears
Until step 7 is complete, this job looks more profitable than it is — you have billed the revenue and not yet recorded all the cost.
The quotation charge lines list shows every line still waiting for a cost. Working it is what keeps reported margin honest.
→ Quotation charge lines and closed periods
9. The books close — Finance
Every step above wrote to the ledger automatically: the invoice, the vendor invoice, the customer's payment, the cash movement. Posting rules turned each event into journal entries; nobody typed them.
At month end, the costs are in, the bank is reconciled, and the period is closed so the numbers stop moving.
→ Journals · Financial reports and the event log
Where jobs actually go wrong
Five points, in the order you meet them:
| Step | The failure | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qualifying a customer who already exists | The account's history splits in two, permanently |
| 2 | The wrong unit on a freight line | You underquote and find out at invoicing |
| 5 | Advancing a shipment by editing instead of transitioning | Documents never generate, notifications never send |
| 7 | A vendor invoice entered as one lump, not per shipment | No job's margin is trustworthy |
| 8 | Charge lines left uncosted at month end | Cost lands in the wrong period |
Four of the five are unrecoverable by the time anyone notices.
Where the handoffs are
| From | To | The handoff |
|---|---|---|
| Sales | Sales | Qualify — lead becomes a company |
| Sales | Approver | The credit exception, if one is raised |
| Sales | Operations | Process — the quotation becomes work |
| Operations | Billing | The shipment reaches a billable state |
| Suppliers | Accounts payable | Vendor invoices arrive |
| Everyone | Finance | Month-end close |
Each is a point where a job can sit unnoticed. See The operating rhythm for the lists that catch them.
Last updated 9 September 2026