Container Shipment Tracking and Landed Cost

Ask an importer what a landed unit actually costs and you usually get a spreadsheet, a pause, and a caveat. The purchase order says one number. Then ocean freight arrives from the forwarder six weeks later, duty was paid by the clearing agent against a tariff line that covers half the container, insurance is billed quarterly across four shipments, port storage happened because the vessel was late, and the inland haulage invoice lands after the goods have already been sold. By the time all of that is known, the stock has moved and the margin report is fiction.

Standard SAP Business One does have a Landed Costs document, and it does allocate costs across Goods Receipt PO lines by quantity, volume, weight or value. It is genuinely useful and this add-on keeps using it. What it does not give an importer is a container as a thing you can manage: one record spanning several purchase orders from several suppliers, charges from vendors that are not the goods supplier, duty that applies to only some lines because of their HS code, accruals for charges you know are coming but have not been invoiced, visibility of stock that is paid for and on the water, and a milestone trail from booking to delivery. That is the gap this app fills.

What ECOSIRE builds

This is a build-to-order add-on. Nothing is pre-built and there is no instant download. After a scoping call and a fixed written quote we build the shipment and landed cost layer against your company database, your item groups, your charge types, your chart of accounts and your incoterms, then install it into your test company first and production second. Typical lead time is two to four weeks from a signed quote.

Everything is built on SAP Business One extensibility: a shipment as a User-Defined Object, charge and tariff data in User-Defined Tables, cross references as UDFs, and all posting done through the Service Layer (REST) and the DI API into standard documents. We create Landed Costs documents, Inventory Transfers, Journal Entries and A/P Invoices through the supported interfaces so your inventory valuation and your general ledger stay standard and auditable.

The shipment record

A shipment is a header you open when you book, not a document you assemble after the fact. It carries the container or consignment number, bill of lading or air waybill, vessel or flight, incoterm, port of loading and discharge, forwarder, clearing agent, ETD and ETA, and your own reference. Against that header you link purchase order lines and Goods Receipt PO lines from as many Business Partners as the container holds, so a consolidated shipment with four suppliers is one record rather than four disconnected receipts.

Charges attach to the shipment, each with its own vendor, currency, expected amount and actual amount: ocean or air freight, insurance, customs duty and other statutory levies, port and terminal handling, clearing agent fees, demurrage and storage, inland haulage, bank and documentation charges. Expected values entered at booking are what give you a landed cost estimate weeks before any invoice exists.

The apportionment engine

Each charge is allocated across the shipment lines on a basis you choose: value, quantity, gross weight, volume in CBM, chargeable weight, or a manual split when the reality does not fit a formula. Duty is treated differently because it behaves differently. Tariff rates are held per HS code in a User-Defined Table and applied only to the lines that carry that code, so a container mixing a five percent line and a twenty percent line no longer smears duty evenly across both and quietly overstates the cheap item.

Allocated amounts are pushed into SAP Business One Landed Costs documents against the related Goods Receipt PO, which means item cost updates through standard inventory valuation rather than through a parallel costing table only your add-on understands. Where a charge arrives after the goods have already been sold, the revaluation path and its posting date are agreed in scoping with your accountant, because the right answer depends on your costing method and your period-close discipline.

Goods in transit and accruals

Stock that is paid for and on the water should be visible. The add-on supports two patterns and you pick one during scoping: receive the Goods Receipt PO into a dedicated in-transit warehouse and move it with an Inventory Transfer on arrival, or leave the purchase order open and track transit through shipment UDFs with a valuation report. The first gives you in-transit stock on the balance sheet, the second keeps the warehouse list clean.

Charges you expect but have not been invoiced are accrued. The add-on posts an accrual Journal Entry for the expected amount through the Service Layer, and reverses it automatically when the matching A/P Invoice or A/P Service Invoice for that charge is posted. Any difference between accrual and actual goes to a configured variance account, in the vendor currency, converted at the posting rate, so a freight invoice that lands ten percent above the quote is visible as a variance rather than silently absorbed.

Milestones, documents and alerts

A shipment moves through states you define, typically booked, gate in, sailed, arrived, under clearance, cleared and delivered, each with a date, an owner and optional notes. Documents attach through the standard Attachments tab so the bill of lading, packing list, certificate of origin, bill of entry and delivery order live with the shipment rather than in someone's mailbox. Alerts and email notifications fire on an ETA change, an overdue clearance, a shipment closed with unallocated charges, or an actual charge exceeding its expected value beyond tolerance.

Reporting

Delivered reports include a per-shipment cost sheet, landed cost per item per shipment with the apportionment basis shown, a charge reconciliation of expected against accrued against invoiced, in-transit stock valuation, and a duty summary by HS code. Crystal Reports layouts are supplied for the documents your team prints or sends to a broker.

Who this is for

Importers, distributors and manufacturers on SAP Business One 10.0 who bring in sea or air freight, pay duty, use a clearing agent, and need item cost to include all of it. It is most valuable where containers are consolidated across suppliers, where duty rates differ within one shipment, or where charge invoices routinely arrive after the goods have been sold.

How delivery works

Scoping is a call of about ninety minutes on your system: which charge types you actually incur, who invoices them, your incoterms, your costing method, whether you want in-transit warehouses, your HS code discipline, and which reports finance and the shipping desk need. We then send a fixed written quote stating scope, screens, reports, postings, install and training, with exclusions written down.

We build against a copy of your database or an agreed test company, then reconcile a real historical shipment of yours end to end so you can see the add-on reproduce a landed cost you already know before anything posts to production. Installation goes into the test company for user acceptance, then production in an agreed window, with all UDF, UDT and UDO deployment scripted and repeatable.

The add-on runs on SAP Business One 10.0 on Microsoft SQL Server or SAP HANA, on premise or hosted, and is delivered per tenant.

After go-live

You get a thirty-day support window for defect fixes and configuration adjustment, which is usually when apportionment bases and tolerance thresholds get their final tuning, plus recorded training for the shipping desk and for finance. Source code and a full data dictionary are handed over, and longer support or enhancement arrangements are quoted separately.