Outsource your Disbursement Accounting to DA-Desk; making DAs simple, transparent, compliant and cheaper.
We enable average savings of up to $700 per port call.
For a fleet of 40 vessels making 800 port calls a year, that is a total of $560,000 of savings every year.
It’s not just monetary savings, we save you time at every step of the DA process.
Platform / digitisation savings |
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FDA checks – value of credit notes |
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Supplier discounts |
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Payments savings - FX |
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Payments savings – Transaction/fees/bank charges |
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$700 |
Total savings per port call |
1. Platform / digitisation savings
DA-Desk is a digital platform to manage and issue all your DAs.
Digitalisation savings result in the following ways:
Operational benefits
- Time savings for your team – free them up to work on more value add activities, and not the paperwork
- All documents, DAs, payments and SOAs at your fingertips – saves time
- Process efficiency gain and data quality improvement by automating data capture into IMOS and SAP, eliminating manual data entry
- Benefit from benchmarking capabilities of 200,000 port calls annually
- Full visibility of and access to transactional and port cost data (learning loop)
- Ensuring every port call is costed accurately
- Enhancing operators’ control and understanding of port cost without adding significant workload
Organisational benefits
- Ability to scale up without hiring additional resources
- A web-based system that supports multiple processes
- A digital process and information flow linking all departments
Scale benefits
2. FDA checks and resulting credit note savings
We carry out a series of checks and validations on EVERY SINGLE PDA and FDA.
Using a combination of skilled experts, automation and AI.
DAVE – our Disbursement Account Validation Engine software – assists our large team of experts.
DAVE helps check that rebates are accounted for on every transaction, irrespective of the value.
DAVE uses a rule-based engine to ensure variable data relating to discounts and rebates is automatically extracted from the port call. An algorithm assisted by our master data of port regulations ensures the screener is alerted to any possible opportunity of port cost reductions on a DA. Find out more about DAVE here.
Automated validation
On average we secure reductions on 11% of all PDAs and credit notes and on 4% of all FDAs.
We will deal with agents directly to correct the overcharging.
3. Supplier discounts savings
An associated product closely tied to DA-Desk is our solution called PortsDirect – where you benefit from discounts we have negotiated from port suppliers, especially towage and pilotage.
We have a team dedicated to driving the best discounts from port suppliers in over 400 ports.
The net savings are derived by deducting the PortsDirect fee from the discounted amount which we obtain for customers off the vendor’s official tariffs.
4. Payments savings – Reducing your FX and bank charges
Because we make payments for our customers of $12bn a year, we have negotiated access to preferential FX and bank payment fees/charges.
The bank charge and FX savings are calculated by working out the difference between what customers were paying prior to DA-Desk versus the lower rates they pay after taking DA-Desk.
Full quantification and breakdown of the savings are shown on the financial dashboard of each of our customers.
Will I achieve a $700 saving on every port call?
For us at DA-Desk, we believe there’s no such thing as an average customer.
But, just this once, to keep this analysis simple, we’re showing savings for an average vessel type.
But….
The savings figures which our customers actually get from DA-Desk vary greatly depending on a whole host of factors, including:
- trading pattern
- size of fleet and vessel types
- number of direct agreements with suppliers
- freight income (currency).
If you want a more tailored savings report based on your fleet’s characteristics, our sales team would be happy to oblige.
What we mean by “average” in this report
These are typical values of savings for customers who:
- use DA-Desk and its two connected products: PortPayables (our payments solution, how we pay your DA’s) and PortsDirect (discounted rate agreements on port services, especially towage); and
- operate primarily the most common type of vessel we see on DA-Desk which is large bulk vessels and large oil and chemical vessels.
If we analyse customers with very large vessel types these savings numbers will be bigger.
If we analyse customers with mainly small vessels then these savings numbers will be smaller.
So these typical / average numbers are meant as an indication of savings.
Calculating the actual numbers
For our customers with average vessel types we obtained their savings as per their Process Value Review document (which is a report we issue and discuss with every DA-Desk customer once a year, to show them the savings they have obtained from us).
We then did a straight average of the savings to get an average saving per customer.
If you’d like to discuss how DA-Desk can help you, please get in touch today.
We’ve got the entire DA process covered – saving you time at every step
With your Disbursement Accounts process available in one easy to use online platform, there’s no need to worry about backing up data, or installing and maintaining any software.
Never lose an old transaction! And don’t waste time having to hunt around for it!
No more time-consuming excel spreadsheets or hundreds of emails to search through!
Take control of your operations and standardise processes across the organisation. Never miss an alert or delay decision-making.
The DA-Desk mobile app allows you to access and update information at the office or on the go.
Secure online visibility and control from anywhere, anytime.
