South Africa · import & export
Your own record of every container you have in transit.
Not tracking — your forwarder already gives you that, free, for the shipments they handle. This is the register you own: every forwarder in one place, your purchase orders, your box measurements, your landed cost. It survives changing agents.
Built for the cargo owner. Not a forwarder, not a clearing agent — it records what your appointed agent did and transmits nothing to anyone.
What a spreadsheet tells you
SUM ignores empty cells. That volume is short by four boxes, and it looks authoritative. The zero is not a zero — nobody has weighed anything yet.
What this tells you
A partial total says so and shows the counts. Nothing measured shows a dash, never a zero. Counts are safe to add up; measurements are not.
The whole product is in this one comparison. A number you cannot trust is worse than no number, because you act on it.
The problem
Your forwarder’s portal is free. Here is what it still doesn’t do.
Four reasons, each one sourced from the freight industry’s own commentary rather than our opinion.
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01
One portal per forwarder
There is no single portal that fits every forwarder.
Use three agents and you have three logins, none of which knows the others exist. -
02
Access is the agent’s to grant
Visibility is dependent on a forwarder’s willingness and ability to grant access or share data from their system.
The record isn’t yours. Change agents and the history goes with them. -
03
It holds their data, not yours
The portal shows what the agent did. It does not hold your purchase order, your item values and currencies, your carton measurements, or your landed cost — where a broker’s system computes landed cost, it computes it for the broker’s file.
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04
Integration isn’t the answer yet
API software … is not yet mature for international logistics.
Forwarders pushing data into their customers’ systems is a direction of travel, not something you can use this quarter.
And the date keeps moving
By early August 2026, vessels at Durban were averaging about 166 hours at anchorage — near seven days — and a further 116 at berth. The terminal moved to its own Navis N4 system mid-August and weekly throughput fell 26%, with some lines reporting 8–12 day waits. Pier 2 handles more than 40% of the country’s container traffic.
So the register keeps two ETAs and never overwrites the first one. ETA original is what you were promised. ETA current is today’s answer. The slip between them is the number you are paid to notice — and the sign carries the meaning, so it still reads in greyscale.
| Reference | Container no | Status | Port of discharge | ETA | Slip | Items | Boxes | Volume m³ | Weight kg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SHIP-0007 | MSCU 214 887 3 | In transit | Durban | 2026-09-24 | +15 | 3 | 7 | 12.4 3 of 7 | — |
| SHIP-0006 | TGHU 908 114 2 | Customs clearance | Cape Town | 2026-09-11 | +4 | 1 | 12 | 8.9 | 1 460.500 |
| SHIP-0005 | — | Cleared | OR Tambo | 2026-09-02 | −2 | 2 | 4 | 0.71 | 96.250 |
| SHIP-0004 | BEAU 553 201 9 | Delivered | Durban | 2026-08-19 | — | 5 | 31 | 28.6 | 4 018.750 |
Example rows, not anyone’s real containers. SHIP-0005 is an air movement, so it has no container number — the register does not invent one.
The solution
Seven modules. Every one is a list of records and a form to edit one.
No dashboard-that-is-really-a-report, no wizard, no third screen hiding somewhere. Order below is the drill-down: the container, what’s inside it, how it’s boxed, then the reference data.
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Shipments
The container and its movement. Two ETAs and the slip between them, the ports, the vessel, the bill of lading and the customs entry your agent lodged.
one row = one container
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Items
What you bought or sold, inside that container. Purchase order beside supplier, sales order beside customer, HS code, value and currency as the invoice reads them. Findable across containers, so
which container is PO-4471 in?
has an answer.one row = one order line
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Packages
The physical boxes. Order a couch and the couch is the item, but it arrives as three boxes with their own length, width, height, tare and gross weight. Recorded on a phone, at the container, by the person holding the tape measure.
one row = one box
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Standard packages
The box sizes you keep. Pick one and it copies the dimensions onto this box — it does not link. Correct a carton from 60 to 62 cm and the next box inherits it; nothing already recorded changes.
one row = one box size
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Landed cost
Duty, VAT, freight, insurance, port and clearing charges, apportioned across the items by value, weight or volume — using the measurements you already captured. One container can carry an estimate and the real thing side by side.
one row = one calculation
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Tax rules
The duty and VAT parameters, kept as data rather than buried in code. South Africa values on FOB, adds 10% to the customs value before VAT at 15%, and waives that 10% for goods from Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho and Namibia. Rates change; history shouldn’t.
one row = one rule set
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Support tickets
Raise a ticket without leaving the app and see whether anyone has replied. The thread is append-only — once someone has answered, the question can’t be quietly rewritten.
one row = one ticket
Two things nobody else appears to do
- Carton-level measurement. Every visibility tool tracks the container. We could not find one that records what the boxes inside it actually measure — which is data your own staff generate with a tape measure, and nobody outside your business holds.
- A refusal to show a total it can’t stand behind. The rule at the top of this page, applied on every screen that shows a figure.
Fixed everywhere
- Centimetres and kilograms, app-wide. No per-row unit column — that is what lets a column be sorted and totalled with no conversion.
- Names, not codes. The supplier field holds the supplier’s name. Nothing you look at needs a join to display.
- Incoterms 2020, all eleven rules.
- One browser URL. Desktop, tablet and phone — the phone gets its own layout for measuring boxes at the container.
What you would actually be paying for
A run rate, not a project.
- Per organisation, not per user. This is a one- or two-person job at most companies, and a per-seat meter on that prices at almost nothing. One fee for the business.
- Month to month, no setup fee. Cancel when it stops being worth it.
- Ongoing management and support — hosting, updates, and the in-app ticket thread above, not a licence you install and then own the problem of.
- Custom work is quoted separately, upfront, if you want something that isn’t here.
We haven’t set the number yet
Deliberately. We know the model and we know the band it sits in, but publishing a figure for software that isn’t built would be a commitment made before the thing it prices exists. Ask us and we will tell you where our thinking is — it is one of the things the questions below are for.
What we can say: it is priced as one more line on a monthly invoice, not as a second system.
Where it applies
South Africa first, and specifically.
The duty basis, the 10% uplift before VAT, the exempt-origin list and the port reality behind the two ETAs are all South African. That specificity is the point — a generic global tool gets each of them slightly wrong.
The rules live in a catalogue rather than in code, expressed as
origins exempt from the uplift
rather than as a hard-coded list, so another country
becomes a new rule set instead of a rewrite. No second country’s rules have been
researched, and none is in the first release.
The boundary
What this deliberately won’t do.
A short list is more useful than a long one. These are decisions, not gaps waiting to be filled.
- Submit anything to customs. Ever, in any version. SARS submission needs EDI registration, a signed user agreement and approved software. Your clearing agent does that. We record the entry reference they lodged.
- Order management, invoicing, local delivery. Your ERP owns those. This is the layer around them, not a replacement for them.
- Classify your HS codes. The field is there so you can see what was declared. Tariff classification stays your agent’s responsibility.
- Quote freight or book it. That’s a marketplace, and there are good ones.
- Total across currencies. Adding a dollar item to a euro item produces a number that means nothing. Landed cost states its currency and records the rate it used.
- A second customer or product file. Your accounting system already has those and it should stay the one that does.
Documentation
Every feature written down, so a new team member doesn’t have to ask.
Planned outline. Published on this site, not behind a support request.
- Getting started — your first container, end to end/docs/start
- Shipments — statuses, the two ETAs, and reading the slip/docs/shipments
- Items — purchase orders, counterparties, value and currency/docs/items
- Measuring a container — boxes, tare, gross, and partial totals/docs/measuring
- Landed cost — duty, the 10% uplift, VAT, and apportionment/docs/landed-cost
- Tax rules — keeping rates as data, and adding a country/docs/tax-rules
- Support — raising a ticket and what happens next/docs/support
The honest objections
Reasons not to want this, answered straight.
Including the two places we are genuinely weaker than the alternatives.
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You have no automatic ETA feed.
Correct, and it is the real gap. Carrier feeds exist and we don’t have one, so the current ETA is a field somebody updates. The trade is deliberate: an SA importer’s road and BLNS legs aren’t covered by any container-tracking API anyway, and the boxes have to be measured by hand regardless. An automatic feed is on the roadmap, not in the first release.
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Beacon is cheaper and I can try it free.
Also correct — Beacon publishes $199 a month with a free trial and no credit card. If container-level visibility from API-connected carriers is the whole job, that is a straight better buy and we would say so. It does not hold your carton measurements or compute your landed cost, which is the half we are built for.
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My forwarder’s portal is free.
It is, and you should keep using it. The four reasons above are the whole argument for also keeping your own record — and if none of the four bites for you, this isn’t worth your money. That is question four at the bottom of this page.
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I’d be replacing a spreadsheet that works.
Look again at the comparison at the top of this page. The spreadsheet doesn’t work — it silently sums four missing boxes into an authoritative-looking total. If yours is complete and maintained by one careful person, that is a genuine reason to wait.
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Who is behind it, and will it still be here next year?
Vibe Crafted Software (Pty) Ltd, a small South African company — registration and address are on the Terms of Use page. We are small, and you should weigh that. What we won’t do is claim a scale we don’t have.
Before we build it
Four questions for South African importers.
We would rather find out now than after it’s built. If you import into
South Africa, these are the answers that decide whether this becomes a product — the
fourth one especially, and a straight no
is the most useful reply we can get.
- 01
How many forwarders do you use, and do you log into each one separately today?
- 02
What happens to a container’s box measurements right now — and does anyone outside your business hold them?
- 03
Where does your landed cost come from today, and do you trust it?
- 04
Would you pay for your own record of this, given your forwarder’s portal is free?