Pricing has its own screen, reached from the quotation. It is built on a distinction that everything downstream depends on:
- Cost lines — what the movement costs you. What you expect to pay carriers, agents, hauliers and the port.
- Charge lines — what you bill the customer.
They are separate lists, not two columns of one table. The difference between them is your margin, and keeping them apart is what lets the system reconcile a vendor's invoice against what you expected to pay while the customer's invoice stays untouched.
Cost lines
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Name | What the cost is. |
| Billing code | The code the cost is booked under. See Codes and groups. |
| Unit sales price | The rate. |
| Unit | What the rate is per — see below. |
| Minimum charge | Floor, applied when the calculated amount falls below it. |
| Currency | EGP, USD, EUR, GBP or AED. |
| Payment terms | Prepaid or Collect. |
| Group | Groups related lines on the document. |
| Airline | For air freight lines. |
| Conditions | When this line applies at all — see How pricing is calculated. |
| Comment | Free text. Use it when a rate needs explaining. |
| Order | Position on the printed quotation. |
Charge lines
Charge lines carry the same shape, with the customer-facing differences:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Unit price | What you charge, instead of what you pay. |
| Charge code | The customer-facing code, instead of the billing code. |
| VAT percentage | Tax rate on this line. |
| Depends on | Points at another line so this one is calculated as a ratio of it. |
Units
The unit decides how a rate becomes an amount. This is where quotations most often go wrong, because the wrong unit produces a plausible-looking number.
Simple units
| Unit | Charged per |
|---|---|
| CBM | Cubic metre |
| Kilogram | Kilogram |
| Shipment | The whole shipment, once |
| Unit | Piece |
| Day | Day |
| Invoice | Invoice |
| W/M | Weight or measure, whichever is greater |
Ceiling units — round up to a whole unit before multiplying:
| Unit | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| CBMCield | CBM, rounded up |
| WMCield | W/M, rounded up |
Time-based units — multiply by a number of days, for storage and demurrage:
| Unit | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| CBMxDays | CBM × days |
| CBMCieldxDays | CBM rounded up, × days |
| WMxDays | W/M × days |
| WMCieldxDays | W/M rounded up, × days |
Derived units
| Unit | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Depend on | A ratio of another line. Use for percentage-based charges that follow a base line. |
| Total VAT Exclusive | A ratio of the quotation's net total. Use for blanket percentage charges. |
W/M versus CBM. W/M charges on weight or measure, whichever is greater — the standard for LCL. Quoting CBM where the contract says W/M underprices dense cargo, sometimes badly. Check what the underlying rate agreement actually says.
Conditions
A line can carry conditions, which decide whether the line applies at all — they do not change its rate. A line whose conditions are not met is dropped from the calculation entirely.
Conditions test one of three things only: number of days, payment terms, or the IMO (hazardous) flag. Multiple conditions on one line are combined with OR — any one match includes the line.
Tiered pricing is therefore built as several lines, each with its own day range, not as bands within one line. The exact matching rules, including what -1 means in a range, are in How pricing is calculated.
Calculating
Calculate runs the charge lines and returns each line's total, the quotation total and the currency. Run it after any change to cargo specification or rates — the totals do not recompute silently as you type.
Check three things in the result:
- The totals are in the currency you expected. Mixed-currency lines are legitimate but are a common source of surprise.
- Minimum charges have applied where the calculated figure was small.
- Depends-on lines followed their base, and did not resolve to zero because the base line was dropped by its conditions.
How pricing is calculated sets out the exact order, the basis for every unit, and the rounding and currency rules.
Contracts pre-fill the pricing
Where a contract exists for the company, customer profile, shipping type, load type and port pair, its rates are used as the starting point. That is the point of contracts: repeat traffic should not be priced from memory. See Contracts and tariffs.
Rates pulled from a contract can still be edited on the quotation. Doing so prices this job differently without changing the agreement — which is the right behaviour, and also means an off-contract price leaves no trace unless you write one in the comment.
Confirming and sending
Confirm locks the pricing and issues the quotation to the customer:
- Contacts — who it goes to.
- Template — which document layout to use.
- Email, CC, and whether to send.
Export PDF produces the same document, with a preview option, and can also email it. Preview first. It is the last point at which a wrong unit or a missing minimum charge is cheap to fix.
Expense lines lock a charge line
A charge line can be backed by an expense line once a supplier's accrual or vendor invoice exists against it. That link is what lets finance compare what you expected to pay with what was actually billed — see Vendor invoices.
A backed charge line can no longer be changed or removed — "Cannot modify charge line … it is backed by expense line …", and the same for deletion.
This is the point at which pricing stops being provisional: a supplier has billed against that line, and altering it would break the reconciliation. If the line is genuinely wrong, the vendor invoice claiming it has to be dealt with first — see Vendor invoices.
A related refusal, "Quotation has no charge lines", appears when an operation needs pricing that does not exist yet.
Last updated 15 September 2026