Port calls

Port agency and disbursements

Published 28 August 2026 · updated 22 September 2026

A ship arriving at a port cannot do anything for herself. She cannot order a pilot, clear customs, pay a tug, land a sick crew member or tell the terminal she is ready. A port agent does all of that as somebody’s representative, and the word “somebody” is doing most of the work in that sentence, because the agent is not neutral and was never meant to be.

What the agent does

The agent is appointed for a call and handles everything the call requires: pre-arrival notifications, pilotage and towage bookings, berth allocation with the port authority, customs and immigration, tendering the notice of readiness, supervising and recording the cargo operation, arranging stores, bunkers, spares and repairs, crew changes, medical attendance, cash to master, waste reception, and the clearance to sail.

Two of those matter more to a chartering desk than the rest. The agent tenders the notice of readiness, so the agent’s conduct starts the laytime clock. And the agent compiles the statement of facts, so the agent’s record of timings is the document every subsequent demurrage calculation is built on. Everything else on the list is logistics. Those two are evidence.

Whose agent

The charterparty says who nominates the agent, and the two usual arrangements read almost identically and behave very differently.

Owners’ agents. The owner appoints and pays. The agent’s duty runs to the owner and the ship, and the ship’s interests are represented at the berth by somebody who answers to her. Common on voyage charters where the owner wants control of the notice of readiness and the statement of facts.

Charterers’ agents. The charterparty requires the owner to use an agent the charterer nominates, often the terminal’s regular agent, who may handle every ship calling there. The owner still pays the agent for the ship’s business. Efficient at the berth, because the agent knows the port and the terminal, and structurally awkward, because the person recording the timings in a dispute is the counterparty’s regular correspondent.

That is why a protecting agent, sometimes called a husbandry agent, exists. When charterers’ agents are imposed, the owner may appoint a second agent at the same port purely to look after the owner’s interests: to attend the ship, to check the statement of facts before it is signed, to make sure the notice of readiness is tendered properly and to watch the disbursement account. The fee is small compared with a demurrage claim lost on a document nobody on the owner’s side had read.

The general legal position is what makes this coherent. The agent is the agent of its principal, owes duties to that principal, and does not become impartial by being convenient to everybody. An agent appointed by charterers is still handling the ship’s business and still owes the ship the ordinary duties of care, but their commercial relationship is with the party that sends them work every week. Read a document knowing who prepared it.

The PDA and the FDA

Money at a port call moves through two documents that share a name and describe different things.

	PDA	FDA
Name	Proforma disbursement account	Final disbursement account
When	Before the call	After the ship has sailed and every supplier has invoiced
What it is	The agent’s estimate of what the call will cost	The actual costs, with third party invoices attached
What it is for	Funding the agent in advance, and pricing the voyage	Reconciliation. A balance due to or from the agent

The agent is normally put in funds against the PDA before the ship arrives, because the agent is about to pay the port authority, the pilots and the tugs out of its own account. When the FDA is issued the difference is settled either way.

A typical account is mostly items nobody controls: port dues, tonnage or light dues, berth or quay dues, pilotage in and out, towage, mooring and unmooring, launch hire, the ISPS security charge, waste reception, agency fee, and whatever the ship ordered on top. The agency fee is frequently the smallest line on the page.

Why an optimistic PDA is not a saving

The trap is treating the PDA as the cost of the call. It is an estimate, it is quoted competitively, and an agent competing on the estimate has an obvious way to win. The FDA is the number, it arrives weeks later, and by then the voyage has been priced and often fixed.

Three things routinely make the difference:

Overtime and out of hours working. Pilots, linesmen, customs and terminals all charge differently at night, at weekends and on public holidays. A PDA drawn on normal hours for a ship that berths at 0200 on a Sunday is not wrong, it answered a different question.
Time in port. Several charges scale with days alongside or at anchor. A call that runs long moves lines that the PDA quoted for a short call.
What the ship ordered. Stores, spares, repairs, crew changes, launch hire and cash to master are not in a PDA because nobody knew about them yet.

The useful discipline is to compare like for like: PDA against PDA at the same port for the same size of ship and the same expected stay, and then FDA against FDA over time. An agent whose estimates land close to the final account is worth more than one whose estimates are low, and the only way to know which you have is to keep both numbers.

Who pays for what

The charter decides it and the pattern is stable. Under a voyage charter the owner ordinarily bears the port costs, because they are inside the freight, subject to whatever the terms say about specific charges being for charterer’s account. Under a time charter the charterer pays port charges and the owner keeps the crew, the stores and the ship’s own husbandry items. See voyage charter versus time charter for the wider division.

Either way, the ship’s own items on an FDA belong to the owner even when a charterer’s agent paid them, and a disbursement account that mixes the two without separating them is the single most common cause of an unnecessary argument at settlement.

The document to actually read

If you read only one thing an agent produces, read the statement of facts, and read it before it is signed rather than after. Arrival, notice of readiness tendered and accepted, berthing, commenced and completed loading, every stoppage with a stated reason, weather, shifting, sailing. Those timings settle the laytime, the laytime settles the demurrage, and the demurrage is frequently larger than every other line on the disbursement account put together.

References

BIMCO, Agency Appointment Agreement, 2017. bimco.org
BIMCO and FONASBA, FONASBA Standard Liner and General Agency Agreement. bimco.org
FONASBA, the Federation of National Associations of Ship Brokers and Agents, standard documentation and quality standard. fonasba.com
International Transport Intermediaries Club, claims guidance for ship agents and shipbrokers. itic-insure.com

The statement of factsThe agent’s timed record of everything that happened in port. Every demurrage claim is decided on it, long after anyone was watching. Notice of readinessThe one page that starts the laytime clock: arrived, ready, tendered, and the separate way each of those three is attacked. How to calculate laytime and demurrageWhere the clock starts, what stops it, how the demurrage figure is actually worked out, and why most claims are lost on the paperwork rather than the merits. Who is who on a fixtureA dozen parties, several of them called the owner and two of them called the agent. Who instructs whom, and who you may telephone.

Neptune Atlas

The agent's statement of facts is where laytime comes from, and Neptune Atlas turns that document into a laytime sheet directly rather than having somebody retype the timings into a spreadsheet, with every stoppage kept as the agent recorded it. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.

Try 7 days free Ship chartering software for brokers What each plan includes