The Anatomy of a Port Call: Nomination to Settlement, Explained

Outside the industry, "port call" sounds like a single event, a ship arrives, does its business, leaves. Inside an agency, it's a six-stage process, each stage with its own documents, approvals, and failure points. If you've ever wondered exactly what an agency is doing between the moment a vessel is nominated and the moment the account is finally settled, here's the plain version.

The Six Stages

Nomination

The shipowner or charterer nominates the agency to handle the call. This is where vessel details, cargo, and expected arrival get recorded, the starting point everything downstream references.

PDA — Proforma Disbursement Account

The agency estimates every cost the call will incur: port dues, pilotage, towage, launch services, surveyor fees, the agency fee itself. This goes to the principal for approval before any funds move.

Prefunding

Once the PDA is approved, the principal transfers funds to cover it. The agency now holds the money needed to pay port authorities and service providers as the call happens.

The Active Call

The vessel arrives, berths, and does its business, cargo operations, bunkering, whatever the call requires. Every event, from pilot on board to all fast at berth, gets logged as it happens.

FDA — Final Disbursement Account

Once the vessel sails, actual costs are reconciled against the original PDA. Anything that came in over or under estimate gets accounted for here, before the books can close.

Settlement

The final balance is settled between agency and principal, any surplus refunded or shortfall invoiced. The call is formally closed once this is done.

Six stages, six chances for the process to break, if each one lives in a different file.

Where It Usually Breaks

Each handoff between stages is where things go wrong. Nomination details get typed into the PDA spreadsheet by hand, so a wrong figure at stage one quietly becomes a wrong figure at stage two. The active call, stage four, is often tracked only in a WhatsApp group, so the Statement of Facts at stage five gets reconstructed from memory instead of pulled from a real log. And because the PDA and FDA are usually separate documents built weeks apart, stage five frequently reveals a mismatch nobody caught earlier.

None of this is one team's fault. It's what happens when a six-stage process runs across five different tools, none of which were built to talk to each other.

The Solution

QUAYLINE treats the port call as one continuous workspace instead of six disconnected documents. Nomination details carry straight into the PDA builder. The PDA a principal approves is the same record the FDA gets reconciled against. Every event during the active call is logged in real time, building the Statement of Facts as it happens instead of after the fact. Settlement closes out a record that's been accurate the whole way through, not one stitched together at the end.

Why It Matters

A port call handled this way isn't just faster. It's a process your principal can actually see, at any stage, without asking. That visibility is what turns a one-time client into a repeat one.