Features

Each vessel in your fleet receives exactly one running cost template — a unique, controlled budget structure that defines how operating costs are organized for that ship. The one-template-per-ship model enforces consistency and prevents duplicate or conflicting budget structures from proliferating across your fleet.

Templates follow a draft-to-published lifecycle. Build your category structure, configure approval rules, and refine the template in Draft status. When ready, publish it to make the template available for live budget estimations. The published template becomes the authoritative cost structure for all estimations created against that vessel.

Organize your vessel's operating costs into a hierarchical tree of expenditure categories — parent categories contain child categories, and budgets roll up cumulatively from leaves to root. This tree structure mirrors real-world cost breakdowns: Crew costs contain subcategories for wages, overtime, travel, and provisions; Technical costs break down into maintenance, spares, repairs, and class surveys.

Each category in the tree carries its own estimated budget amount, assigned department, and approval configuration. The hierarchical rollup means you can see total estimated and actual spending at any level — from a single leaf category to an entire department or the vessel total. Add, reorder, and restructure categories at any time during the draft phase.

Create budget estimations for specific date ranges — annual budgets, quarterly plans, or any custom period your organization requires. Each estimation references the ship's published template and captures per-category budget amounts with BigDecimal precision, ensuring no rounding errors accumulate across hundreds of line items.

Multiple estimations can exist simultaneously for different periods, and one estimation is marked as the default for quick-access reporting. The estimation system supports the full lifecycle: create an estimation, populate category budgets, track actuals against estimates, and archive completed periods — all while maintaining a complete history of every budget figure change.

Compare real expenditures against budgeted amounts in real time. As verified expenditures flow into the system, the module automatically aggregates actuals per category, per department, and per vessel — providing instant variance analysis at every level of the category hierarchy.

Drill down from fleet-level budget health to individual category variances. Identify overspends before they become critical, spot underutilized budgets that could be reallocated, and track cumulative variance trends across estimation periods. The actual vs. estimated view is the financial pulse of your fleet operations.

Manage multiple budget estimations per vessel across different time periods. Active estimations track current spending, archived estimations preserve historical budget data for trend analysis and year-over-year comparison, and deleted estimations are soft-removed while maintaining audit trail integrity.

The three-status estimation lifecycle (Active, Archived, Deleted) ensures you always have a clean view of current budgets while retaining full historical data. Switch between estimation periods to compare spending patterns, analyze seasonal variations, and build more accurate future budgets based on actual historical performance.

Designate one estimation per vessel as the default — the primary budget that appears in dashboard widgets, fleet overview screens, and quick-access reports. The isDefault flag ensures that fleet managers always see the most relevant budget data without navigating through multiple estimation periods.

Change the default estimation at any time as budget cycles roll over. When a new annual budget is created, promote it to default and the entire reporting layer updates automatically. The previous default remains accessible as a standard estimation for historical comparison.

Bootstrap a new vessel's cost template by importing the category structure from an existing template. The import operation runs as a background task, asynchronously copying the complete hierarchical tree — categories, subcategories, department assignments, and budget configurations — without blocking the user interface.

Import is especially valuable when adding new vessels to your fleet. Rather than rebuilding the category structure from scratch, import from a similar vessel type and customize as needed. The background executor handles large category trees efficiently, and the template's busy-state indicator prevents concurrent modifications during the import process.

When restructuring your cost template, move expenditures from one category to another before deleting the source category. The move-and-delete operation runs as a dedicated background task, reassigning all linked expenditures to the target category while preserving their full transaction history and approval status.

This safe deletion model ensures no expenditure data is orphaned when categories are reorganized. The background executor processes the move atomically — either all expenditures transfer successfully or the operation rolls back. A busy-state lock prevents other users from modifying the template during the migration.

Set the operating currency per template, supporting fleets that operate across multiple currency zones. Each vessel's running cost template carries its own currency designation, and all budget amounts and actuals within that template are denominated in the selected currency.

Change the template currency when operational requirements shift — for example, when a vessel moves from a USD-denominated trade route to a EUR-denominated region. Currency changes are recorded as template events, maintaining a complete history of currency transitions for audit and reporting purposes.

Configure per-category approvers and reviewers with three execution methods: All (every designated person must approve), One (any single approver is sufficient), or Not Required (skip the approval step entirely). This flexible model lets you enforce strict oversight on high-value categories while streamlining low-value routine expenses.

Set multiple approvers and multiple reviewers per category. The execution method determines how the approval chain resolves — unanimous consent for critical budget items, first-available approval for routine items, or direct processing for pre-approved categories. Approval and review configurations are stored at the template level and apply to all estimations.

Visualize spending patterns with heatmap analytics that aggregate expenditures by month or quarter across top-level categories. The heatmap view reveals seasonal spending peaks, identifies consistently over-budget categories, and highlights cost anomalies that warrant investigation.

Select monthly or quarterly period grouping and a date range spanning multiple years. The analytics engine expands the date range into individual periods, aggregates actual expenditures per top-level category per period, and renders the results as an interactive heatmap. Drill down from any cell to see the underlying expenditure transactions.

Filter actual expenditures by status and date range to isolate exactly the spending data you need. Query verified expenditures for a specific quarter, pull draft expenditures awaiting approval, or review cancelled items for audit purposes — all with precise date boundaries.

The date range query powers both the actual vs. estimated comparison and standalone expenditure reporting. Combine status filters (Draft, In Progress, Verified, Cancelled) with date boundaries to create focused views: "Show me all verified expenditures for Q3 2025 in the Technical department" or "List all cancelled expenditures across the fleet this year."

Export estimation vs. actual data to Excel with three export formats tailored to different reporting needs. The budget summary export shows per-category estimated vs. actual with variance calculations. The detailed transaction export lists every individual expenditure with full metadata. The department rollup export aggregates by the seven expenditure departments.

Use Excel exports for board presentations, owner reporting, charterer budget submissions, and internal financial reviews. The export formats follow maritime industry conventions, ensuring your running cost data is immediately usable by external stakeholders without reformatting.

Add, edit, and delete comments on any budget estimation to maintain a running dialogue between fleet managers, finance staff, and technical superintendents. Comments provide context that numbers alone cannot — explaining why a category was overspent, noting a one-time extraordinary expense, or flagging a budget reallocation request.

Every action within the module is recorded across 21 event types — 9 estimation events (NewEstimationCreated, CategoryDeletedAndMoved, ChangedStatus, UpdatedEstimationForCategory, UpdatedStartDate, UpdatedEndDate, AddedComment, DeleteComment, EditComment) and 12 template events (NewTemplateCreated, TemplateTitleChange, CategoryUpdated, NewCategory, DeleteCategory, Publish, Import, DeleteAndMovedTo, ChangedCurrency, SetApprovalExecutionMethod, SetReviewalExecutionMethod, SetMultipleApprover, SetMultipleReviewer). The complete audit trail provides full accountability for every budget decision.