Port cost data modernised

Port costs are consistently one of the largest expenses in shipping, often ranked just behind fuel. Yet unlike fuel, which the industry has spent the past decade digitising through voyage planning tools, bunker optimisation, and emissions tracking, disbursement accounts are still managed largely as they were 30 years ago: on spreadsheets, in email threads, invoice by invoice.

This outdated approach deserves more attention than it gets: a single port call typically generates dozens of invoices spanning pilotage, towage, agency fees, and more, each needing to be checked, coded, and reconciled by hand. A single voyage can produce as many as 300 pages. When multiplied across a fleet, the administrative load becomes substantial, but it rarely registers as a strategic problem because most companies have never tracked it as one.

Fragmented manual workflows let inflated port charges go unnoticed, with the cost felt directly in profit and loss. A process that looks like a back-office inconvenience on paper can quickly become an operational one in practice.

Part of the reason is that many operators believe they solved this years ago by handing disbursement accounting to a third party. But outsourcing didn’t change the underlying process – the paperwork may move off someone’s desk, but it doesn’t disappear. Many outsourced providers still run the same manual checks and the same spreadsheets that would have been familiar in the 1990s, meaning that the problem hasn’t gone away; it’s simply become harder to see.

That matters even more in today’s freight markets, where risk is amplified in both directions. When margins are tight, unexplained cost variance quickly erodes voyage profitability. When markets are strong, the same inefficiencies are absorbed by healthy returns and go unnoticed.

The 2024-2025 disruptions in the Red Sea added a further layer, rerouting vessels, increasing port calls, and pushing disbursement volumes up at exactly the moment every other cost line, from financing to fuel to carbon compliance, was moving the wrong way too. Fuel costs are especially exposed to this pressure, driven by oil prices no operator can control. That makes the predictability of a well-managed disbursement process more valuable, not less: it’s one of the few large cost categories operators can actually forecast, offering room to offset the parts of the budget they can’t.

REBUILDING THE PROCESS

The operators pulling ahead are rebuilding the process itself, validating every disbursement account against live tariffs and market benchmarks rather than relying on assumptions and memory, and treating port cost data as something to own and understand in-house, not delegate and forget.

A genuinely modern approach moves from reactive and manual to structured and continuously validated. AI plays an important role in that shift by handling repetitive tasks and analysing large volumes of disbursement data far more efficiently than manual processes ever could, allowing people to focus on exceptions, judgement, and commercial decision-making. Instead of checking invoices after the fact, the process becomes predictive, using historical port-call intelligence to flag unusual charges before they’re paid and giving operators confidence that what they expect to pay aligns with what they’re charged.

Framed this way, the case for modernising port disbursement management goes beyond cost or convenience. It has become a marker of how seriously an operator runs its wider business, whether it treats one of its largest cost categories with the same discipline as fuel or crewing, or continues to accept a level of manual risk that would be unthinkable elsewhere in the operation.

The commercial case for this shift goes beyond catching individual overcharges, though that alone matters for profit and loss. On average, operators taking this approach save more than US$700 per port call, and some have tripled their processing capacity without adding headcount. Just as significant is what that structure frees teams to do instead, for example, focus on genuine exceptions and supplier relationships, rather than routine reconciliation. In a cost category this large, even a modest percentage improvement translates into a meaningful annual return.

For many years, disbursement accounting has been treated as an administrative necessity rather than a strategic opportunity. But as one of the largest cost categories, it has been left in the background for far too long. Outsourcing the process made sense when reducing the administrative burden was the priority. Reclaiming ownership and empowering in-house teams with the tools to manage shipping’s second-largest cost centre faster and more accurately makes sense more than ever. The savings are real. So is the confidence that comes from managing this process with the same rigour and digital efficiency operators already apply to other areas of their business.

Antonis Malaxianakis*, Founder and CEO, HarborLab

Antonis Malaxianakis is the Founder & CEO of HarborLab, a maritime technology company transforming how the global shipping industry manages port costs and disbursement accounts.