The broker's position is the design

A broker owns neither the cargo nor the ship. You sit between two principals, you are paid by one of them and only on conclusion, and your working capital is a mailbox and a memory. Ship broker software that ignores that shape ends up modelling an owner's fleet or a charterer's programme and asking a broker to keep it filled in.

So the objects here are the ones a desk actually keeps: a cargo enquiry, an open position, the fixture between them, and the company you write to. There is no fleet to maintain unless you have one, and no cargo programme unless you own the cargo.

It starts at the mailbox, because the market does

Position lists and cargo enquiries are circulated by owners, charterers and competing brokers, and no vendor sells them. That is the structural fact behind this whole product: the information a broking desk trades on arrives as e-mail and leaves as e-mail, and it exists nowhere a subscription can reach.

Connect the mailbox you already pay for and each circular is read as it lands. The vessel, the open dates, the port or the trading area, and the owner's own wording kept beside the parsed dates, because OPEN SPORE 11/14 AUG DELY DOP carries terms no structured field records. A mailbox is private to the person who connected it: nobody else at the desk, owner or administrator, can read it.

Nothing reaches the board until a broker confirms it. A circular names a ship without an IMO and thousands of names in the register are shared, so the reading is automatic and the identification is not. Guessing which hull was meant is how one company's ship gets stapled to another's fixture.

The match, and the arithmetic behind quoting it

Tonnage search, on two bases

Desk and above

When a ship is free next, from the positions on your own desk, and where she is now, from the shared AIS register. The screen never blends them, and it prints what it could not answer for: a hull carrying no position at all is not the same as a hull that is not open.

Cargo enquiries, sized to tonnage

Desk and above

Find tonnage takes the deadweight band off the top of the stem and prints the band it searched, so a broker who knows a suitable ship can see why she did or did not appear.

Sea distance and passage time

Desk and above

Between any two of 11,425 ports, routed through water rather than over land, with canals, draught and war-risk areas accounted for. A distance you cannot see is a distance you cannot check, so the route is drawn.

Voyage estimate and TCE

Chartering and above

Freight in, commissions, bunkers by grade and port costs out, over the days the ship actually takes. It also states the freight the cargo would have to pay to meet the owner's asking rate, which is the number an argument about a rate is really about.

One cargo against several ships

Fleet and above

The same estimate run for up to eight hulls and ranked by TCE per day, each ballasted from where she actually is.

Fixtures and the recap

Desk and above

Negotiating, on subs, fixed. The recap is kept exactly as it was issued rather than regenerated later from data that has moved since, and the negotiation thread stays in your own shorthand: the indication that was refused is the reason the next one was accepted.

Laytime and demurrage

Chartering and above

The statement of facts becomes the time sheet, and an interval counts only where the event that opens it counts. That is how a rain stoppage is excluded without deleting the record of it, which is what a claim is argued from.

Who to write to, at fleet scale

Four ownership roles and routinely four different companies: registered owner, group owner, technical manager, commercial manager. The registered owner is usually a single-ship company with no chartering desk behind it. The commercial manager is the party a cargo is addressed to, and only one of those two answers.

45,386 hulls carry a commercial contact who can be e-mailed about a fixture. The rest are shown as having none. That is the honest state of registered ownership data rather than a blank to be filled in optimistically, and a role address is flagged as a role address instead of being passed off as a person.

Shipbroking software is the narrower phrase

A broking desk owns neither the cargo nor the ship, so shipbroking software is a tool for the party in the middle: two lists nobody publishes, the match between them, and the record of what was agreed. Chartering software is the wider category, covering the owner pricing his own hull and the charterer moving his own cargo as well.

Neptune Atlas is one product doing both, and an account states which party it is so the desk opens on the screen that party works from. This page is the broker's half of it; ship chartering software is the whole of it.

Within broking the same desk comes in several shapes, and the cases are written out separately: a small desk of two to ten brokers, a dry cargo desk and a project and heavy lift desk, where the cargo has dimensions rather than a tonnage.

What it does not do

It does not account for your commission. Brokerage is a line in the voyage estimate, where it belongs to the arithmetic of whether a cargo is worth taking; it is not a ledger of what the desk is owed, and pretending otherwise would be selling a screen that does not exist.

It does not sell you registered owners in bulk, because nobody can. The registries that hold that column do not publish it as a file, and a product that appears to have it has filled it with a guess.

What it costs, or read what a ship broker does across 101,900 hulls.