How PortFlow runs a port call on one shared operational record, from vessel ETA to final invoice.
PortFlow runs the whole port call on one shared record, so the captain, the agency, operations and finance all work from the same data instead of re-keying it between tools. The call opens with the vessel's arrival and departure held in the port's own local time, which matters more than it sounds: a call that straddles a clock change still reads correctly to everyone looking at it. From that record you produce the IMO FAL paperwork, build the Pre-Disbursement Account, quote the port services, and turn the confirmed quotation into an invoice that stays tied to the operation it came from. Payments, balances and client statements continue in the same place rather than in a separate ledger someone has to reconcile. Nothing is entered twice between ship, agency and finance, which is where most of the errors used to come from.
PortFlow is built for maritime agency quotations and billing. A quotation covers every service on the call, each as its own line, priced from rates you set once instead of rebuilt by hand. It can be issued as a PDA laid out in the standard BIMCO and FONASBA structure an owner expects to read, as a PDF in English or Spanish. A confirmed quotation becomes an invoice linked to the operation, with part payments, corrections and client account statements following from the same place. Invoices are issued in whatever currency the client is billed in, and receivables are totalled per currency: a payment settles an invoice in its own currency, and PortFlow will not quietly convert between them to make a balance look clean. A billing exceptions view surfaces operations with no invoice, only a voided one, more than one, or an amount that does not match, and puts each one in front of a person to decide rather than deciding for them. One agency measured its quotation preparation drop from about 35 minutes to under 10. That is one agency's result, not an average.
PortFlow replaces the Excel and WhatsApp patchwork with one shared record rather than adding another disconnected layer on top of it. It takes over the operations tracking, the quotations and the invoicing that used to live in spreadsheets, and it replaces the WhatsApp document chains with the Captain Portal, a dedicated channel between agency and vessel where nothing scrolls away. Your existing crew data comes in the way the owner already sent it, with a review step so conflicts and duplicates surface before anything is written. The point is to remove the double entry, not to give you a second system to keep in step with the first.
PortFlow includes a Captain Portal the master reaches through a secure link that belongs to his vessel alone, with no account to create and no password to lose. From it he submits or updates the ETA, requests provisions, fresh water and crew boat transfers, approves quotations, views and downloads invoices and documents, manages his crew and their papers, and sees the vessel's Port State Control history. Every action lands on the same record the agency is already working, stamped so it can be traced later. It replaces the email and WhatsApp chains with one channel both sides can see, and the link stops working whenever you decide it should.
PortFlow centralizes port services under the port call, meaning the physical vessel stay, which it deliberately keeps separate from the financial operation that gets invoiced. Conflating those two is what makes figures impossible to trace back later. The service catalog covers what a call actually needs, from berthing, pilotage and towage to customs clearance, ISPS security, sanitary inspection and agency coordination, alongside bunkering, water supply, provisions, crew boat and crew change. The operational services have their own modules, and PortFlow will not let one of them be created as a plain quotation line as well, so a bunkering job cannot end up existing in two places with two different numbers. Each service carries its own rate rules and links back to the vessel and the client. Because everything sits on the shared record, operations, documents and finance all read the same status at the same time.
Your agency's data is walled off from every other agency by the database itself, not by a filter in the application code that a developer could forget to apply on one query. A request that arrives without your context returns nothing at all rather than someone else's rows. Access to protected routes is decided on the server from a verified session, never from something the browser claims about itself. Two-factor authentication with an authenticator app and single-use backup codes is available to every user. Sensitive crew data, including passport details and date of birth, is encrypted by the application before it is stored, on top of the encryption the database already applies, and is unlocked only where a document or a review genuinely needs the value. A global audit log records who did what and when, sign-in is protected against brute force, and an automated job re-checks the isolation and permission boundaries on a schedule and raises an alert if anything drifts. Vercel and Neon, which host the application and the database, are independently SOC 2 Type II certified. PortFlow does not hold a certification of its own yet, and we would rather say so than let their audits be read as ours.
PortFlow tracks each crew member's documents, including passport, visa, seaman's book, national identity document, medical certificate and the individual STCW Manila 2010 certificates, against their real expiry dates. A document whose issuer states no expiry, or whose expiry is genuinely unknown, is recorded as exactly that instead of being turned into a false alarm, because an alert system nobody trusts is worse than none. Certificates are surfaced by how urgent they are, with the time remaining shown, and a broader compliance view tracks what is due and what is overdue across the agency. The alerts go out on a schedule, so a lapsing certificate reaches you before the vessel does rather than after an inspector finds it. All of it reads from the same crew and vessel records used to produce the FAL crew list, so there is no second list to keep current.
Yes. PortFlow records Port State Control inspections against each vessel: the authority that carried it out, the port, the inspector, the outcome, whether the vessel was detained and for how long, and whether the case is still open. Each inspection holds its own deficiencies, chosen from a built-in catalogue of the harmonized codes the major MOUs use, grouped by area and flagged when the item is one that tends to lead to a detention, then tracked with its status and a due date. The dashboard totals your detentions and open deficiencies, an inspection report can be produced in English or Spanish, and follow-ups that need attention are flagged on a schedule. Captains can see their own vessel's history from the portal, which cuts out a round of emails before an arrival. What PortFlow does not do is pull inspection records from any MOU database: each inspection is entered by the agency, and we would rather be clear about that than let it be assumed.
Yes, both. From a port call, PortFlow builds a Pre-Disbursement Account laid out in the standard BIMCO and FONASBA structure, so an owner reads it in the shape they already expect. Each service knows where it belongs in that layout, whether it is a pass-through cost you are advancing on the owner's behalf, and how it is charged, whether that is a flat amount, a percentage, or something with a floor and a ceiling. When the call is over, the Final Disbursement Account is issued against the call it belongs to, and it is assembled from the operations that call actually generated rather than from a list somebody picked by hand. That distinction is the point: it means an arbitrary total cannot be relabelled as an FDA after the fact. Departure clearance can be held while an FDA is still unpaid. Because the PDA, the quotation, the operations and the FDA all read from the same record, there is no parallel spreadsheet left to reconcile at the end.
PortFlow generates the IMO FAL paperwork from the port call itself, so the vessel, the voyage and the crew already on the record are not typed a second time into a form. The pre-arrival deadline is worked out from the call and tracked for you, in the port's own local time, which means it stays right through a daylight saving change instead of quietly slipping by an hour at exactly the time of year when nobody is checking. The crew list is drawn from the crew records you already maintain and can be produced for a vessel or for a specific call. PortFlow produces the documents and tracks the deadline. It does not transmit anything to the port authority on your behalf, and local filing requirements still have to be met the way your port asks for them, so treat this as the paperwork being ready on time rather than the filing being done for you.
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