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Chartering desks, shipbrokers, operators, and ship managers

Please stop running the chartering desk on WhatsApp and Excel.

Indications, recaps, and FFA levels arrive as messages. Voyage estimates live in one person's workbook. Commission is tracked by hand. Saffron builds the system the desk should have had, and the desk owns it.

Show us your fixture sheetSee the workflows
A chartering office overlooking a working port, with printed cargo documents, ringing phones, and a wall board of vessels updated by hand

What it runs on today.

What a chartering desk runs on today, and what each one costs.

  • WhatsApp broker groups

    Indications, offers, and FFA levels, read off a phone and re-typed.

  • Outlook

    Recaps, fixtures, and the daily rate PDF, opened one at a time.

  • Excel voyage estimates

    One workbook per route, one person who understands it.

  • The commission workbook

    Deals, nominations, and invoices reconciled by hand each month.

  • Noon reports

    Emailed sheets from the vessel, copied into the fleet file.

  • IMOS, Q88, Danaos, BASSnet

    Sized and priced for fleets far larger than yours, with six to twelve month rollouts.

Where the time and the money go.

  • Re-keying

    The message is the record.

    A broker's indication lives in a WhatsApp thread until someone types it into the sheet. Every re-key is a chance to be wrong, and the original is lost in the scroll.

  • Reporting

    The morning report is built by hand.

    Baltic rates, bunker prices, and voyage costs are copied into a report before the desk can start. Across the sector, reporting consumes around 4.6 million staff hours a year.

    Source: MarineLog on the seafarer paperwork burden

  • Revenue leakage

    Commission and DA reconciliation leak money.

    A disbursement account carries twenty or more vendor charges per port call, and the gap between PDA and FDA is where disputes and late payment start. Commission tracked in a workbook has the same problem: nobody sees what is overdue.

    Source: Base on disbursement account reconciliation

  • Audits

    Expiry dates in a spreadsheet get missed.

    The Paris MoU detained 4.03 percent of inspected ships in 2024. Certificates and survey windows chased from a sheet are how a fleet ends up on that list.

    Source: Paris MoU 2024 annual report

The fixture recap everyone scrolls for is the place to start.

Show us your spreadsheet

What each workflow becomes.

The system prepares the work and stops at the decision. A named person approves anything that leaves.

01From broker message to fixture record

Starts when. A broker sends an indication or an FFA level on WhatsApp.

Broker indications
BEFORERead off a phone, typed into the sheet, original lost in the thread
NOWParsed from approved numbers only, in the formats brokers use, and held for review
FFA levels
BEFORECopied from messages into a curve workbook
NOWSaved to the curve with a record of who sent what, and when
Bad data
BEFOREFound at month end
NOWFailed parses logged and flagged the same minute

  1. 01A message arrives

    WhatsApp or email from a broker number the desk has approved.

  2. 02The system parses it

    Vessel, route, laycan, rate, and period extracted and validated.

  3. AI DRAFTS

    03AI drafts the record

    A clean fixture or FFA entry, with anything ambiguous marked.

  4. A PERSON DECIDES

    04The desk approves

    One click to save, or a correction. Nothing is written without it.

  5. 05Saved and confirmed

    The record lands in the database and a confirmation goes back to the chat.

02The morning report, unattended

Starts when. The daily rate PDF lands in the inbox.

Market rates
BEFORETyped in from an emailed PDF each morning
NOWRead from the inbox automatically and checked three ways
Voyage economics
BEFORERecalculated in a route workbook
NOWSix calculators, saved and shared by link
Client reports
BEFOREAssembled by hand and sent one at a time
NOWBuilt from saved blocks, scheduled, released by reply

  1. 01Rates arrive

    The PDF is read, retrying for half an hour. Stale data is refused.

  2. 02Costs recalculated

    Bunker curves and route costs update every voyage estimate.

  3. AI DRAFTS

    03AI writes the brief

    From the figures only. No invented causes or forecasts.

  4. A PERSON DECIDES

    04An approver releases it

    Reply to send, or rewrite the wording. Recipients cannot change.

  5. 05Delivered and archived

    By email or WhatsApp, on schedule, with a copy on file.

03Post-fixture commission, end to end

Starts when. A deal is fixed and the vessel nominated.

Deal capture
BEFOREA row in the commission workbook
NOWOne record per deal, duplicates warned before saving
Invoicing
BEFORERaised by hand, numbered by memory
NOWRaised from the deal, numbered safely, corrected with an audit trail
Collection
BEFOREChased when someone remembered
NOWOverdue by entity and counterparty, visible every morning

  1. 01Deal fixed

    Recap details captured once, vessel nominated.

  2. 02Commission calculated

    By counterparty and collecting entity, with the agreed rate applied.

  3. AI DRAFTS

    03AI drafts the invoice

    Invoice and cover note ready to send, with the recap attached.

  4. A PERSON DECIDES

    04Finance approves

    A person checks the figure and the entity before anything leaves.

  5. 05Sent, tracked, reconciled

    Payment status updates the pipeline. Overdue items surface on their own.

The same pattern, for the technical side

  • PDA and FDA reconciliation, line by line against the port call
  • Crew change coordination, from relief planning to sign-off
  • PMS and certificate expiry with survey windows, no spreadsheet
  • Noon reports parsed from the vessel's email into the fleet record

The same build pattern, not yet shipped proof. The first one starts on your call.

Built to keep the records the audits ask for.

The system holds the evidence in the form an auditor or inspector expects. Saffron does not certify anything. The records do the work.

  • ISM Code

    Section 10, maintenance of the ship and equipment

    Maintenance, defects, and corrective actions recorded per item with running hours and dates.

  • MLC 2006

    Seafarer employment agreements and rest hours

    SEA copies, wage records, and rest-hour logs stored per seafarer and per voyage.

  • STCW

    Certificate validity

    Every certificate with its expiry, and a relief list that will not schedule an expired officer.

  • PSC

    Port State Control readiness

    Survey windows and class items visible by vessel, so nothing is found by an inspector first.

  • RPSL

    DG Shipping recruitment and placement licence

    Placement records and the audit trail an RPSL inspection expects, for Indian manning.

These are record-keeping features, not certifications. Your flag, class, and auditors remain the authority.

Built for a chartering desk already.

22 Maritime's desk has run on Saffron for fifteen months: 24 unattended jobs, 22 workflows, and WhatsApp and Outlook feeding one database the company owns.

A maritime chartering office overlooking a working port, with paper cargo documents and a hand-updated wall board of vesselsDry bulk shipping and chartering
22 Maritime

The desk that ran on spreadsheets, email, and WhatsApp now runs on one platform, with the morning data arriving on its own.

BEFORENOW
Typed in from an emailed PDF each morningRead from the inbox at 10:15 and checked three ways
Assembled by hand, sent one at a timeBuilt from saved blocks, scheduled, approved by reply
Remembered24 scheduled jobs that run unattended
jobs run unattended
24jobs run unattended
workflows on one platform
22workflows on one platform
months of building, and counting
15months of building, and counting
Read the case study

Is your desk ready to leave the spreadsheet? Tick what is true.

Six quick checks.

Show us your spreadsheet

One subscription. Your spreadsheets, retired one at a time.

Your internal software team

$4,999

per month

Show us your spreadsheet

Tell us which sheet costs the most time. Thirty minutes, no preparation needed.

Included in the subscription

  • Unlimited software and automation requests
  • One active build at a time
  • Your spreadsheet data migrated, not retyped
  • AI that drafts, with a person approving
  • Ongoing additions and improvements
  • Application, database, and source code ownership
BlackRockBrit InsuranceCMG Financialtrulead22 Maritime

Questions, answered plainly.

Book a 30-minute call
Do you replace IMOS or Q88?

Where they fit, no. IMOS is built for large fleets and priced accordingly. Saffron builds the system a desk of your size actually needs, and it can read from and write to the tools you keep, including Q88 questionnaires and market data feeds.

Can it read our WhatsApp groups?

Yes, from numbers you approve. Messages from those senders are parsed into fixtures, indications, or FFA levels and held for a person to confirm. Everything else in the group is ignored.

We are a ship manager, not a broker. Does this apply?

The pattern is the same. PMS, certificate expiry, crew change, and PDA and FDA reconciliation all start as a spreadsheet and a chat thread. The first build is whichever costs your office the most time.

What about vessels with poor connectivity?

Ship-side forms are built to work offline and sync when the link is up. Shore sees the update when it lands, with the time it was written on board.

Who owns the data and the code?

You do. The application, the database, and the source code are yours from the first month. Stop the subscription and everything keeps running.

How fast is the first workflow live?

The first working replacement usually ships within the first weeks. 22 Maritime's desk went from a WhatsApp-and-Excel routine to scheduled, reviewed reports, then kept adding workflows for fifteen months.

Bring the fixture sheet. We will build what it should have been.

Pick the workflow that costs the desk the most time. Thirty minutes, no preparation needed.