Freight Management
Welcome to the Freight Management module of Nama ERP — the module built specifically for shipping, forwarding, customs-clearance, postal, and logistics companies, where the "goods" you sell aren't items on a shelf but a service: moving a container from port to port, clearing a shipment through customs, delivering a parcel to a customer's door.
Who is this module for?
Most ERP modules revolve around items entering and leaving a warehouse. Your freight business is different: you sell time, routes, and services. You buy ocean freight, clearance, and trucking from suppliers (shipping lines, agents, hauliers), then resell them to your customer at a margin. The Freight Management module is built around this logic from the ground up:
- No stock items, no balances — instead, service items (ocean freight, customs clearance, trucking, genset, courier…).
- One central document — the Operation Order — that gathers every detail of a shipment in one place, and from which bills of lading and invoices branch off.
- Purchase and sales price lists per service, with profit markups calculated automatically.
- E-invoicing that intelligently handles the "agent" model, where part of the amount is a pass-through cost and part is your commission.
Alongside freight and logistics, the module includes a complete International Postal System (IPS): receiving mail receptacles, manifesting items, transferring between offices, sorting, and final last-mile delivery. We cover it in a separate section of this guide.
Watch the tutorial
A nine-minute video explains how an export forwarder works, then follows one shipment through Nama from the rate sheet to the profit on each line.
The Big Picture
Let's follow one export shipment from the rate sheet to the invoice: two refrigerated containers of frozen vegetables, from Damietta to Antwerp.
- Rates come in. Shipping lines change their rates every month, route by route and container by container. You load each line's new rates as a purchase price list: Damietta to Antwerp, a 40-foot high-cube reefer, $1,185.
- Quotations go out. From that list, Create Sales Quotation builds a sales price list for one customer, with your markup added: $60 a container on ocean freight, so $1,245. Clearance, trucking and genset rates get price lists of their own, from the broker, the trucker and the genset supplier. The quotation then prices every booking that customer makes that month. The steps are on From Supplier Rates to Customer Quotations.
- The booking. When the customer books, you open an operation order, the shipment's file: shipper, consignee, shipping line, ports, vessel, voyage, booking number, containers, and a tick for each service the shipment needs. Update All Services prices every service tab from the customer's quotation, so each line carries its supplier, what it costs you and what you charge.
- The bill of lading. Create Bill of Lading copies the parties, the vessel and the ports onto a bill of lading. You add what only loading day tells you: the container numbers, the goods and the weights.
- Paying the suppliers. Truckers, brokers and genset suppliers usually bill per shipment: tick their lines on the order and press Create Purchase Invoice. Shipping lines bill many shipments at once: on a purchase invoice, Update collects every line from that carrier not invoiced yet, across all operation orders.
- Billing the customer. The sales invoice takes its lines from the order and matches each one to the supplier's cost on the same order, so it shows, line by line, what you paid and what you made.
Along the way the operation order tracks its status (under operation, shipped, arrived…), records a telex release, splits off a short shipment, and copies itself for a similar booking.
How a forwarder makes money
Every charge on a forwarder's bill is one of three kinds, and knowing which is which explains most of the figures you will see on a sales invoice's Cost and Diff columns:
| Kind | Examples | On the sales invoice |
|---|---|---|
| Resold with a margin | Ocean freight, customs clearance, trucking, genset | Cost is the supplier's price; Diff is your margin. |
| Passed on at cost | The shipping line's port charges (THC), official government receipts | Cost equals the price, so Diff is zero. That is correct, not a fault. |
| Your own fees | B/L withdrawal, the VGM declaration | There is no supplier, so Cost is zero and the whole price is profit. |
The profit on a shipment is the sum of those margins and fees.
A Diff equal to the whole price
On a fee of your own, that is expected. On a service that does have a supplier, it usually means the supplier's invoice was saved after the sales invoice — see Invoices & Returns.
Words you will hear
Forwarders use these terms every day, and the screens use them too.
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Shipper | The exporter who owns the goods, and usually your customer. |
| Consignee | The buyer abroad who receives the goods. |
| Shipping line | The carrier that owns the ships (ZIM, MSC, Maersk…). In Nama it is an ordinary supplier. |
| POL / POD | Port of loading and port of discharge. |
| Vessel and voyage | The ship and its trip, for example ZIM Antwerp, voyage 41S. |
| Booking | The space reserved with the shipping line, with its booking number. In Nama, the operation order. |
| Reefer / high cube | A refrigerated container, and the taller box. |
| Genset | The generator that powers a reefer while it is on the truck. |
| Bill of lading (B/L) | The carrier's receipt for the goods, and the document the buyer needs to collect them. |
| Telex release / sea waybill | Releasing the cargo without sending paper original bills. |
| Prepaid / Collect | The shipper pays the freight at origin, or the buyer pays it at destination. |
| VGM | Verified gross mass: the container's weighed weight, declared before loading. |
| THC | Terminal handling charges, the port's fee for handling the container. |
How documents work in Nama ERP
Understanding document states
Unlike systems where a saved document needs a separate step before it reaches the accounts, Nama ERP acts immediately:
Draft mode: Create and edit a document with no accounting effect.
Saved: Once a document is saved out of draft, its accounting effect is created immediately (revenue/cost/customer and supplier balances).
Edits: Any change to a saved document is reflected at once, with no separate confirm step.
Licensing
The freight and clearance documents are gated behind the module license frm (NaMa Freight Management). The postal half has a licence of its own, frm-ips — so a licence can carry one without the other. If a licence is missing, its menus simply do not appear.
How this guide is organized
The module is large, so we've split it into two main areas that mirror how the system itself is organized.