Walk into almost any ship agency office along the African coast and you'll find the same setup. A shared Excel file tracking active vessel calls. A WhatsApp group with the operations team, the finance lead, and sometimes the client. An inbox full of forwarded emails, each one a fragment of a decision nobody wrote down properly. This is not a small agency problem or a poor-agency problem. It is the industry default, from Lagos to Mombasa to Nouakchott.
The Problem
A vessel calling at a port triggers a real sequence: nomination, a proforma disbursement account (PDA) sent to the principal for approval, prefunding, the active port call itself, a final disbursement account (FDA) once the vessel sails, and settlement. Every stage produces documents, numbers, and decisions that other people need to see.
Right now, most of that sequence lives in places that don't talk to each other. The PDA is a spreadsheet emailed as an attachment. The approval is a one-line WhatsApp reply that says "ok go ahead," buried three hundred messages deep by the time anyone needs to find it again. The Statement of Facts gets reconstructed from memory and scattered notes after the vessel has already departed, when the details are hardest to get right.
Principals feel this the most. A shipowner or charterer with a vessel in port has one real question: what is happening right now, and what am I being asked to pay for? Without a shared system, the honest answer is that they have to ask someone and wait. Agencies aren't hiding anything. There's simply no single place to look.
Why It Persists
This isn't a case of agencies not knowing better. Three things keep the WhatsApp-and-Excel setup in place.
First, the tools were free and already familiar. Every team member already had WhatsApp and Excel installed. No procurement process, no training budget, no vendor conversation. That's a real advantage that any replacement has to beat, not just match.
Second, the maritime software that does exist wasn't built for agencies. Most platforms in this space are built for shipping lines managing fleets, or large freight forwarders managing cargo. A port agency's actual daily unit of work, the single vessel call from nomination to settlement, doesn't map cleanly onto that kind of software. Agencies tried the enterprise tools, found them heavy and expensive for what they needed, and went back to spreadsheets.
Third, switching has always meant a slow, expensive project. Legacy maritime software comes with training manuals, onboarding webinars, and sometimes a consultant flown in to set the team up. For a mid-sized agency running a handful of vessel calls a month, that cost and disruption has rarely looked worth it, even when everyone privately agrees the spreadsheet is a liability.
The Solution
The fix isn't asking agencies to adopt heavier software. It's giving them a system built around the actual unit of their work, the port call, that's lighter to start using than the spreadsheet it replaces.
That means the full nomination-to-settlement lifecycle living in one place, visible to the whole team at once, instead of scattered across an inbox and a chat thread. It means a proper PDA builder instead of a spreadsheet formula someone half-remembers. It means the client approval step, historically the most friction-heavy part of the process, reduced to a secure link a principal can open and approve in one tap, no account or password required. And it means the Statement of Facts building itself in real time, event by event, instead of being reconstructed from memory after the vessel has sailed.
This is what QUAYLINE was built to do. Not a shipping line platform repurposed for agencies, and not an enterprise tool that needs weeks of onboarding. A system shaped around the port call itself, built to be opened in a browser and understood the same day by the operations team, not just by IT.
What To Do About It
If your agency is still running vessel calls through a shared spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group, that's not a mark against your operation. It's the industry standard, for the reasons above. But it's worth asking what it costs you every month in missed updates, reconstructed documents, and principals who have to chase you for a straight answer.
The agencies that move first on this get two things: a real operational advantage while their competitors are still forwarding email chains, and a head start on the client trust that comes from being able to say "check the portal" instead of "let me get back to you."