Cargolake
Help & Guides/Getting started

Where to start, by job

The short reading list for your role — sales, operations, billing, accounts payable, credit control or administration.

Back

There is more here than anyone needs. This is the short list for what you actually do.

Everyone should read Following a job from enquiry to cash first — twenty minutes that make the rest make sense — and Finding your way around.

Sales

Your day: enquiries in, quotations out, chasing acceptances.

  1. Working with leads — capture, log activities, qualify
  2. Companies — commercial terms, and the credit picture
  3. Creating a quotation
  4. Pricing a quotation
  5. Contracts and tariffs — where your rates come from

Then: Customer profiles, when one customer needs more than one arrangement.

The two things that cost you money: quoting on the wrong unit, and qualifying a customer who is already in the system under another name.

Operations

Your day: moving live jobs, chasing documents, keeping dates honest.

  1. The shipment record
  2. Running a transition — the most important article for your job
  3. Cargo, packages and containers
  4. Master shipments, containers and voyages — which record to update
  5. Splitting and merging shipments

Work daily: the pending-pickup list.

The habit that matters: move shipments with transitions, never by editing fields. A transition generates the documents and sends the notifications; an edit does not.

Billing

Your day: turning completed work into invoices that get paid.

  1. Invoices — especially the three company roles
  2. Credit notes
  3. The VAT portal

Then: Invoice types, to understand why some invoices cannot be edited.

Check before issuing: the billing company, every line's source, and the total against what was quoted.

Accounts payable

Your day: supplier invoices in, allocated, approved, paid.

  1. Vendor invoices
  2. Quotation charge lines and closed periods
  3. Custody payment requests, if representatives handle cash

Work weekly: the charge-lines-awaiting-cost list. It is the difference between reported margin and real margin.

The rule: one line per shipment. A carrier invoice covering twenty jobs is twenty lines.

Credit control

Your day: deciding who gets credit and chasing what is owed.

  1. Companies — limits, on-hold and available balance
  2. Company transactions — why a customer is at their limit
  3. Working the exceptions queue — approving over-limit work

Before approving an exception: check whether the exposure is live work or old unpaid invoices. They are different problems with different answers.

Administration

Your day: people, access, and keeping reference data clean.

  1. Adding and managing users
  2. Building roles — including why some roles cannot be edited
  3. Your company — members, seats, subscription
  4. Reference data overview — the discipline that keeps the catalog usable

The question you will be asked most: "why can't I see X?" The answer is almost always a missing ability, or a permission change the person has not signed out and back in to pick up.

Setting the system up

Configuring from scratch, roughly in this order:

  1. Reference data overview — ports, agents, warehouses, carriers
  2. Quotation types, codes and groups — charge and billing codes
  3. Contracts and tariffs
  4. Shipment configuration
  5. Workflows, then The form builder, then transitions
  6. Invoice types
  7. Building roles and Exception roles

Finance configuration — chart of accounts, posting rules, tax groups — runs alongside from step 2 onwards, because posting rules refer to the codes you set up there.

When something goes wrong

Troubleshooting is organised by symptom. Glossary has the terms, including the pairs people mix up.

Last updated 9 September 2026