Nobody sells this data

A position list is circulated by owners and by competing brokers, to a distribution list, as prose. It is not a feed and there is no vendor to buy it from. Every desk that has one built it out of its own e-mail.

That is why this starts at the mailbox. Connect the account you already use, over IMAP or OAuth, and the circulars are read where they land. Your mail stays with your provider: message bodies are never stored here, which is a line in the terms of service rather than a preference, and a mailbox is private to the person who connected it. Nobody else at the desk, owner or administrator, can read it.

What the parser takes, and what it refuses

Out of a line like MV NORDKAP / 28,650 DWT / OPEN SPORE 11-14 AUG it takes the vessel, the deadweight, the open window and the place. The place is usually a trading area rather than a port, because owners give positions as areas constantly, and a field that insists on a named port either loses the position or invents a precision the owner never gave. There are 31 trading regions for exactly that reason.

The owner's original line is kept beside the parsed dates, always. Abbreviations carry terms no structured field records, and a broker arguing a fixture needs the words that were sent, not this software's summary of them.

Nothing is written without a broker confirming it. A circular names a ship and gives no IMO, and thousands of names in the register are shared between hulls, so matching one to a ship is a judgement whose failure mode is somebody else's vessel attached to your laycan. The reading is automatic. The identification is a decision, and it stays one.

On the board

The open tonnage board

Desk and above

Every position the desk holds, filtered by trading region and by the window she is open in, with the source of each row on the row: from your e-mail, from a pasted circular, or logged by hand.

Paste a circular

Desk and above

A circular that arrived somewhere the desk has not connected can be pasted in whole. The same parser reads it and the same review screen confirms it.

Superseded, not deleted

Desk and above

When an owner re-circulates a ship, the newer position supersedes the older one rather than overwriting it. What the desk was told last week is still what it was told last week.

Your open tonnage on a map

Fleet and above

The same board drawn geographically, so a cargo out of one region shows its candidates in one look. Positions given as an area plot to the area, and the count says how many could not be plotted rather than dropping them silently.

Tonnage search

Desk and above

One cargo against the board: deadweight range, size class, region to region, in the window. The answer keeps what came from your e-mail separate from what came from the shared register.

Three records that are not the same record

A position list says when a ship is free next. An AIS fix says where she is now. A port line-up says what a port expects at its berths. Conflating them is the oldest error in this trade and it is why these are three screens here rather than one.

A ship can be mid-ocean on AIS and open in Singapore on the eleventh, and both are true. Only one of them lets you offer her.

The difference, at length, or what it costs.

Part of the wider shipbroking software for a chartering desk.