Most things that go wrong in a forwarding business are not mistakes. They are jobs nobody looked at. This is the set of lists that catch them, and how often each needs working.
Assign each one to a person by name. A list that belongs to "the team" belongs to nobody.
Daily
| Check | Where | Why it cannot wait |
|---|---|---|
| Pending pickup | Shipments | The booking is done, the customer thinks it is moving, and nothing has physically happened. Today it is a phone call; next week it is a claim. |
| Exceptions queue | Exceptions | Every pending exception is a quotation not with a customer. |
| Quotations awaiting the customer | Quotations → My quotations | Offers have a validity date and go stale. |
| Shipments with a passed ETA and no ATA | Shipments | Either it arrived and nobody recorded it, or it did not and nobody noticed. |
The last one is the cheapest early-warning signal in the system, and it costs a minute.
Weekly
| Check | Where | What you are looking for |
|---|---|---|
| Charge lines awaiting cost | Expenses | Jobs whose margin is not yet real. |
| Unreconciled custody requests | Expenses | Cash outside the business with no receipts against it. |
| Vendor invoices still pending | Expenses | Payables entered but never reviewed. |
| Unsubmitted invoices | Invoices → VAT portal | A growing backlog here means a data problem upstream. |
| Failed events | Finance → Event log | The ledger is incomplete by an amount nobody has quantified. |
| Voyages with no ATA | Catalog | Sailings that arrived weeks ago still sitting in the live list. |
Never advance further custody to a representative with an unreconciled request outstanding. That is how untracked cash accumulates, and it is a weekly check because a month is too long.
Monthly — before closing
Run in this order. Each step depends on the one before.
- Issue every invoice for work completed in the period.
- Enter every vendor invoice relating to the period — including those that arrived after month end. Their date must fall in an open period, so this is the step that constrains the rest.
- Clear or accrue the charge lines awaiting cost. Whatever is outstanding at close is cost recognised in the wrong month.
- Reconcile every custody request.
- Reconcile the bank accounts and count the cash against the treasury balances.
- Run the summary trial balance. Look for accounts sitting on the wrong side of their normal balance — that is your best single signal.
- Clear the event log. A failure left here is a posting that never happened.
- Close the period.
Closing a month also closes every month before it. A vendor invoice is refused when its date falls within or before a closed period, so closing out of sequence has wider effect than it looks. Close in order.
Who closes
One named person, on a defined date, working the list above. A period closed by whoever happened to be on the screen is a period nobody has checked.
Closing early is the common mistake
A period closed with costs still to come pushes them into the following month, where they distort a month they do not belong to — and the distortion is invisible unless someone remembers. Being a few days late with a correct close beats being on time with a wrong one.
Quarterly
| Review | Why |
|---|---|
| Credit limits | A customer who triggers an exception on every quotation has the wrong limit, not a recurring emergency. |
| Agent tariffs | They change without your involvement, which is exactly why they are forgotten. |
| Contracts near expiry | An expired contract quietly stops matching, and quotations come up unpriced. |
| Inactive users and stale members | Leavers who still have access. |
| Exception approvals | Who approved what, and whether one person is clearing everything within seconds. |
| Duplicate catalog records | Two ports, two carriers, two companies for the same thing — split reporting. |
Signals that something is structurally wrong
These are not tasks. They are patterns that mean a process needs fixing rather than working harder:
- The exceptions queue grows steadily. Credit limits are out of date, not commercial conditions.
- The charge-lines list never empties. Costs are not being chased, and no margin figure you produce is trustworthy.
- The same customer appears in exceptions every week. Fix the limit.
- Event-log failures accumulate. Configuration is wrong, and every retry fails the same way.
- Documents are regularly missing. Someone is advancing shipments by editing rather than transitioning.
- Vendor invoices routinely differ from what was quoted. Either the estimates or the rate agreements are wrong; find out which before absorbing another month of it.
The four numbers worth watching
| Number | Where | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Charge lines awaiting cost | Expenses | How much of your reported margin is provisional |
| Pending exceptions | Exceptions | How much sold work is stalled |
| Unsubmitted invoices | VAT portal | Compliance exposure |
| Failed events | Finance event log | How incomplete the ledger is |
All four should be near zero most of the time, and all four are cheap to look at. A weekly glance at these tells you more about the state of the business than any report.
Last updated 15 September 2026