Neptune Atlas
Ship broker software vs spreadsheets
Ship broker software keeps vessel particulars, open tonnage, cargo enquiries and fixtures in one record, keyed on a vessel identity that survives renaming and sale. A spreadsheet does the same job, well, for a while. Almost every broking desk starts on Excel and e-mail and for a one or two person desk that is genuinely the right answer. It stops being the right answer at a predictable point, and the useful question is not which is better but which point you are at.
The short version
Six operational areas, and what changes in each when a desk moves off a sheet. Every figure in the right-hand column is measured against the Neptune Atlas register and is sourced in the sections below.
| Operational area | On a spreadsheet | On a vessel record |
|---|---|---|
| A shared position list | Two brokers editing the same book produce two books. The desk fixes off whichever was open. | One list, one current state, and a history of who changed what. |
| Vessel identity | A row says TAISHO 31. So do several other real ships. |
Keyed on IMO number, which is permanent for the life of the hull. |
| Renaming | A ship sold and renamed becomes a second row, and the first one rots. | A name history, so a line-up printing her old name still finds her. |
| Ownership | One “Owner” column, filled in with whichever of five companies somebody had to hand. | Four roles held separately, so the chartering e-mail goes to the one that answers it. |
| Positions against AIS | Where she is and when she is free drift into the same column. | Separate records, because they answer different questions. |
| Laytime | A calculation that produces a number nobody can reconstruct six months later. | A calculation worked against the statement of facts, line by line. |
What a spreadsheet is actually good at
A position list in Excel is fast, flexible, needs no training and costs nothing. It takes a shape nobody anticipated without asking permission, which is exactly what a small desk needs while it is still working out how it trades. Nobody should replace that out of principle, and a desk that is comfortably inside a sheet is not doing anything wrong.
The honest case for software starts where the spreadsheet stops, not where a vendor would like it to.
The four things that break, in order
1. Two people editing the same book
The first real failure is not a feature gap, it is a merge conflict. Two brokers working the same tonnage list produce two lists, and the desk quietly starts fixing off whichever one was open. Nothing errors. The cost is a ship offered that was withdrawn yesterday, and it lands on the broker who looks least prepared in front of a principal.
2. The ship in the sheet is not the ship you mean
Ship names collide constantly. Measured across the Neptune Atlas register of 101,850 hulls that
carry an IMO number, 5,027 names are carried by more than one hull, covering 14,252
ships. A row saying TAISHO 31 does not distinguish between the several real
ships of that name, and it has no deadweight to rank them by unless somebody typed one in.
Anything serious keys on the IMO number, which is issued once per hull, never reissued, and survives renaming, reflagging and sale.
3. Ships get renamed and the sheet does not know
Renaming is not an edge case. 11,869 hulls in the Port State Control inspection records Neptune Atlas holds have been inspected under more than one name, out of 44,764 hulls with any inspection history at all. A port line-up prints whatever the authority calls her, frequently a name she was sold out of years ago. Matching on the current name alone creates a duplicate instead of finding her, and the duplicate is the row that gets updated next time.
4. Laytime stops being arithmetic
A demurrage calculation across a statement of facts with exclusions is a place where a spreadsheet is not wrong so much as unauditable. When a claim is disputed six months later the question is not what the number was, it is how it was reached: which stoppage was excluded, on what wording, from which line of the statement of facts. A cell containing a total cannot answer that, and the claim is usually lost on the documentation rather than the merits.
What to actually look for
If a desk does decide to move, these are the questions that separate a vessel database from a list with a search box. They are also, deliberately, questions this product can be asked.
- Does it key on IMO, and does it validate the check digit? AIS feeds carry numbers that look like IMOs and are not. The Odoo system this product replaced held 5,861 of them before validation was added. An unvalidated number can match a real record and staple one ship's ownership onto another's hull.
- Does it keep a name history? If not, it will duplicate every ship that has ever been sold, and the duplicates accumulate silently.
- Does it model ownership as more than one field? A hull has up to five companies behind it: registered owner, group owner, technical manager, commercial manager, and a disponent owner who is a different thing again. Only one of them answers a chartering e-mail.
- Does it tell you what it does not know? A deadweight search that silently drops the hulls with no deadweight on file returns a confident number that is wrong. In the Neptune Atlas register 26,254 hulls carry an IMO number and no deadweight at all, which is a fifth of it. Ask any vendor what share of their register has none. The honest answer is not zero.
- Does it separate a position list from an AIS fix? If a demo shows live positions when you asked about open tonnage, the model underneath is wrong.
- Whose vendor licence covers the data? Internal-use and redistribution licences are very different products at very different prices.
On price
The established platforms in this category do not publish pricing. They are sold as annual contracts with an implementation project and land in five or six figures a year, which is correct for a large owner or a trading house and is not a purchase a three-person broking desk can make. If a tool cannot be evaluated without a sales cycle, that is a signal about who it was built for.
So when does a desk outgrow the spreadsheet?
Not at a headcount and not at a revenue figure. At the point where a specific list of things start happening, and the useful thing about them is that they are all observable rather than a matter of opinion:
- More than one broker needs the same list at the same time, and somebody has started keeping a private copy so they can work uninterrupted.
- Somebody has been caught out by a ship's identity: two hulls with one name, or a ship you already knew arriving as a stranger under a new one.
- You are re-keying the same particulars into a circular, an offer and a recap, and they have started disagreeing with each other.
- Owner contacts live in one person's mailbox. The desk cannot reach a manager without asking a colleague who is on leave.
- A laytime claim has been disputed and reconstructing the calculation took longer than doing it the first time.
- Fixtures are history rather than a book. Nobody can answer what the desk did with that charterer last year without opening several files.
One of those is normal. Three of them at once is a desk paying for the spreadsheet in errors rather than in licence fees, which is the more expensive way to pay. The move is worth making then, and it is genuinely not worth making before.
References
- IMO, IMO identification number schemes, resolutions A.600(15) and A.1078(28). imo.org
- BIMCO, CMI, FONASBA and the Baltic Exchange, Laytime Definitions for Charter Parties 2013, 2013. fonasba.com
- Paris Memorandum of Understanding on Port State Control. parismou.org
Related
Neptune Atlas
Neptune Atlas is the shape described above: one vessel record keyed on IMO number with a name history, four ownership roles rather than an Owner column, positions held separately from AIS fixes, and laytime worked against a statement of facts you can audit line by line. It states what it does not know on every result, which is the part a spreadsheet cannot do for you. Every paid plan starts with 7 free days. A card is needed to start them, and cancelling before they end costs nothing.
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