One Job File From Booking to Invoice
Forwarding, customs, transport and warehouse operations on a single system, with VNACCS/VCIS filing and a tracking page your customers can read themselves.
A freight job touches a sales quote, a booking, a customs declaration, a truck, a warehouse, a set of supplier invoices and finally a customer invoice. In most Vietnamese forwarders each of those lives in a different place, and the only thing connecting them is a person who remembers.
We build the job file as the spine of the system. Every cost, document, status update and invoice attaches to it, so margin per shipment is a fact you can read rather than a number assembled at month end.
Where forwarding operations leak money
Re-keying is the most expensive habit in the industry. The same container number is typed into a booking email, a spreadsheet, a customs declaration and an invoice. Each retype is a chance to be wrong, and a wrong declaration is not a typo, it is a delay at the port with demurrage attached.
The second leak is invisible cost. Supplier charges arrive weeks after the shipment closed. If they are not attached to the job, the margin reported to management is simply wrong, and pricing decisions are made on it.
- Container and declaration numbers typed in four places
- Customer calls asking where the goods are, every day
- Supplier charges landing after the job is closed
- No reliable margin per shipment, lane or customer
What the system does
Job file management
One record per shipment holding the booking, parties, containers, documents, milestones, costs and revenue, visible to sales, operations and accounting at the same time.
VNACCS/VCIS customs integration
Declarations prepared from data already in the job file and submitted electronically, with clearance status flowing back onto the shipment timeline automatically.
Fleet and subcontractor dispatch
Trip planning for owned trucks and hired carriers, driver assignment, fuel and maintenance records, and proof of delivery captured on a phone.
Warehouse and 3PL billing
Inbound, putaway, picking and outbound with storage and handling charges calculated per customer contract rather than reconstructed in a spreadsheet.
Customer tracking portal
A page your customer opens themselves to see milestones and documents, which removes a large share of the daily phone calls your operations team currently answers.
Margin and cost control
Accrued supplier costs recognised at the time the service is used, giving a margin per shipment, lane, customer and salesperson that holds up at month end.
How we deliver it
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1
Process mapping 2 weeks
We follow three real shipments end to end and write down every handoff, document and charge as they actually happen.
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2
Core configuration 4-6 weeks
Job file structure, charge codes, customer contracts and document templates built and reviewed with your operations lead.
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3
Integrations 3-5 weeks
Customs filing, accounting exchange, carrier tracking feeds and the customer portal connected and tested with live data.
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4
Go live and stabilise 4 weeks
Parallel running on real jobs, on site support during the first month end close, then handover.
Who this is for
- Freight forwarders handling sea, air and cross border road
- Customs brokers filing declarations on behalf of importers
- Transport companies running owned and subcontracted fleets
- 3PL warehouses billing storage and handling by contract
Why iGlobal
Customs is built in, not bolted on
VNACCS/VCIS filing reads from the same job file the rest of the business uses, so a container number is entered once and is the same everywhere.
Accounting stays where it is if you want
If your finance team is committed to MISA, we exchange data with it instead of forcing a migration. If you would rather consolidate, we can do that too.
Built by people who have closed a month
Our consultants have sat through month end in logistics companies. The accrual design is the part most systems get wrong, and it is the part we design first.
The best balance of cost, quality, and service
Open source licensing means your budget goes into configuration and training rather than per seat fees that grow every time you hire.
Three ways to do this, compared
| What you are comparing | By hand, on spreadsheets | Off-the-shelf software | With iGlobal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the status of a shipment lives | In the operator's head and a chat thread | In a system your customer has no way to see | On a tracking page the customer opens without asking anyone |
| Customs declaration data | Retyped into the customs system from a printout | Exported to a file, then typed in a second time | Prepared from the job file, with the result read back in |
| Margin on a single job | Known at month end, approximately | Only if every cost was coded to the right job | Visible on the job while it is still open |
| Cost across three years | Hidden inside salaries, so it never appears in a budget | A predictable licence per user, plus the work it cannot do | Quoted per phase and reviewed with you before each one starts |
| Who holds your data | Scattered across files, inboxes and personal phones | On the vendor platform, exported on the vendor's terms | Your own database, exportable in full whenever you ask |
| When something breaks | The person who built the file, if they still work here | A ticket queue, often in another language and time zone | A named engineer in Hanoi you can reach the same working day |
The two middle columns describe approaches that genuinely work for some companies. Where they win, they win, and we have tried to say so.
What changes after go live
The visible change in the first month is the telephone. When customers can read milestones themselves, the operations team stops spending its morning repeating information that is already in the system, and starts working on the shipments that are actually in trouble.
The change that matters more arrives at the first month end. Because supplier charges are accrued against the job when the service is used rather than when the invoice arrives, the margin figure presented to management is the real one. Several clients have discovered that a lane they believed was profitable was not, which is unpleasant to learn and far more expensive not to.
Over a longer horizon, the job file becomes the training material for pricing. With two or three hundred completed jobs carrying honest costs, quoting stops being a matter of instinct and becomes a matter of looking up what this lane has actually cost you.
- Status telephone calls reduced sharply within two months
- Container and declaration numbers entered once, not four times
- True margin per shipment, lane, customer and salesperson
- Month end close shortened because accruals are already posted
Frequently asked questions
Can it handle both import and export, sea and air?
Yes. The job file is mode aware: the fields, documents and milestones change according to whether the shipment is sea FCL, sea LCL, air, or cross border road, while the costing and invoicing behave consistently across all of them.
How does the VNACCS connection actually work?
Declaration data is assembled from the job file and submitted through the electronic channel your company is already registered for. Clearance responses are read back and written onto the shipment timeline, so operations see a status change without opening a second application.
We already use MISA. Do we have to drop it?
No. We regularly run a split where operations and costing live in Odoo while statutory accounting stays in MISA, with a scheduled exchange of invoices and journal entries. Many clients later consolidate, but that is a decision you make once the operational side is stable, not on day one.
Can customers see their own shipments?
Yes, through a portal account that shows only their shipments, milestones and documents. Most clients report a noticeable drop in status phone calls within the first two months, which is usually the fastest visible return of the whole project.
How long before we can stop using the old spreadsheets?
Plan for parallel running during one full month end close. Teams that commit to entering new jobs only in the new system from go live day typically stop opening the spreadsheets within three to four weeks. Teams that keep both as a safety net stay on both for months, so the decision matters more than the software.
Related solutions
Talk to a senior consultant, not a call centre
Tell us what you are trying to fix and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right team for it.