About Shipment 360

You did not start a freight company to chase papers.

This is the story of an ordinary day in a freight office, and of why Shipment 360 exists.

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It starts before you sit down

A worried person at a desk at half past nine, holding a phone, while the customer calls again over a long list of messages

It is half past nine. You have not even reached your chair, and your phone is ringing. A customer wants to know if the container has been gated in. You are sure somebody told you this yesterday. But you cannot remember who, or where.

So you ask operations. The person who handled this booking is on leave today. You open WhatsApp and start scrolling. There are two days of rate requests, seal photos and messages forwarded from the line. You are looking for one line you half remember. While you are still scrolling, the customer calls again. You say you will call back in five minutes. You both know it will take longer.

The enquiry you wanted to answer

A busy person on the phone at a desk with email and WhatsApp waiting, and an enquiry on a diary page lying forgotten on the floor

By eleven, three new enquiries have come in. One is in your email. One is on WhatsApp. Your salesperson took one on a call and wrote it on the back of a diary page. You plan to reply to all three before lunch.

Then a line changes a vessel, and a shipper needs an answer now. The morning is gone. You will not think of one of those enquiries again until next week. Then you suddenly remember it and ring the customer. The cargo has already gone with someone else. The customer is polite about it. Nobody will ever count how many jobs your company has lost this way. There is no report for work that never came in.

The name that went wrong

Four papers side by side with one consignee name spelt wrong, and a person holding their head as the cut-off gets close

After lunch, the papers start. The draft bill of lading has gone to the shipper. The shipper writes back to say the consignee's name is wrong. You check. Someone typed it again from an email, and one word went wrong. Now you open the booking, the email, the packing list and the invoice. Different people typed each one, on different days. They do not all say the same thing.

You correct it and send it again. The cut-off is this evening, and you cannot relax until it has gone. Nobody thanks you for this, because in the end nothing went wrong. It only cost you your afternoon.

The charge nobody billed

An office at night. One person is still at a desk with a detention invoice and a question mark, and the accountant's chair is empty

At six, the line's invoice arrives. It has detention you were not expecting. Did the customer know about it? Has it been billed? The sales invoice is with accounts, in a different system. Your accountant has gone home. You make a note to ask tomorrow. But tomorrow there will be other things.

Some weeks later, somebody may notice that you paid this charge and never passed it on. Or maybe nobody will. You go home, and you check your phone at dinner.

Then the month ends

A person holding their head between two tall stacks of files at month end, with a long calculator roll running to the floor

Your accountant wants the purchase bills. Operations say they handed them over. Some are in a file, some are in an email, and one is on somebody's phone. The GST date will not wait for any of this.

Then you ask the simplest question in business. Did we make money on this job? It should take a minute. Instead it takes a long sheet, two people and most of a day. Even then, nobody is sure of the answer. You have worked hard all month. Your people have worked hard. The office has never been quiet. But when you look at the bank, you cannot quite say where the money went.

What you do not say aloud

A person leaving through the office door with a box of files and a phone, while the owner watches from the desk

There is one more thing. You think about it more often than you say. Most of your business is in the heads of two or three people. They know which customer pays late, which agent to ring, and where the old files are. They are good people. But if one of them leaves, a part of your company leaves with them, on their phone. The new person will take months to find out what was lost.

It is not your people

None of this happens because anyone is careless. Your team works hard, and some of them work harder than they should have to. It happens because one job lives in too many places: WhatsApp, an inbox, Excel, Tally, a phone call, somebody's memory. Each of these is fine on its own. But none of them talks to the others.

So your people become the link. They carry each detail from one place to the next. They type it again, ring someone, or remember it. In many freight offices this takes most of the day, and it is why people get so tired.

Most companies have tried to fix this. A bigger spreadsheet. A rule that everybody must update it. A meeting every morning. It works for a week. Some have bought software made for another kind of business. Then they watched Excel slowly come back, because a real freight job does not run that way.

Why Shipment 360 exists

Shipment 360 was built on one plain idea. A freight job should live in one place, from the first enquiry to the last invoice. Everyone who works on it should look at the same page. Everything else in it comes from that.

So think of the same day again.

The customer rings at half past nine. You open the job. Its enquiry, quotation, booking, CRO, bill of lading, documents, containers and invoices are all on one page. You can see the container's last recorded move and its date. So you can answer while the customer is still on the line, even though the person who handled the booking is on leave.

The three enquiries go on the Job Board, and each one is given to a person. Anyone can see which ones are waiting and who has them. You make the quotation from the enquiry and send it as a PDF, by email or WhatsApp. When the customer says yes, a person confirms it, and it becomes a booking. Nobody types the details again.

The bill of lading is made from the booking, so nobody types the consignee's name a second time. You can still edit it before you print it.

When the line's invoice comes, you record it against the job. You can also start a detention invoice from the job. Your bill and your cost are on the same page. Once the invoices are issued, the job shows what it earned, with reimbursements kept separate. Did you make money on this job? You open the job and read the answer.

At month end, the accounts, GST and TDS are in Keeplee Books, and the bills carry the job's reference. Attendance, leave and pay are in Keeplee HR & Payroll. The owner opens the BI Dashboard and sees revenue, profit, cash and what is owed, all on one page.

And when somebody leaves, their work stays where it was. It is on the job, not on their phone. The new person opens the page and sees what has happened so far.

One job in Shipment 360, with its enquiry, quotation, booking, CRO, bill of lading and invoices on one page, in a sample company
One job on one page. Picture from a sample company. The names and figures are made up.

What it will not do

We would rather say this plainly. Shipment 360 will not make freight easy. Lines will still change vessels, and customers will still ring at half past nine. It does not file with ICEGATE. It prepares the papers, and you file them. It does not track containers live. A person records each move. It is for sea freight, not air. And your team will need time to change old habits, which is never easy.

What it can do is take away the searching. No more scrolling, ringing round, or typing the same thing again. Then your people can spend the day on the work you hired them for. And you can answer simple questions about your own company.

Who makes it

Shipment 360 is made by Keeplee Infotech Pvt. Ltd., which started in 2020. We work with people who have spent many years in the freight business. So the Job Board follows the way a real job runs.