The three partners on a booking
Line, shipping company and referrer are three separate slots — and what a partner sees when they log in.
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Three roles, not one partner
A shipment usually involves more than one company, and they are not interchangeable. A booking has three partner slots:
- Line — the shipping line or NVOCC whose service the cargo moves on.
- Shipping company — the carrier or agent actually operating the leg.
- Referrer — who introduced the business, and who the kickback on the container lines is paid to.
All three are optional, all three are independent, and the same partner can sit in more than one slot — an agent who both operates the leg and brought you the customer is selected twice, which is correct rather than a mistake.
Only Staff can set them. A partner logged into their own portal can read a booking assigned to them but cannot reassign it.
What a partner sees when they log in
If you have partner portal logins enabled, a partner sees the bookings where they hold any of the three slots — and only those. Bookings that do not name them do not exist as far as their account is concerned.
They are also told, rather than left to check: a milestone you record on one of their bookings, or a cancellation, lands in their portal notifications. That is worth knowing before you hand somebody a login — a partner with an account hears about the shipments they are on.
On the bookings they can see, they get the route, the containers, the milestones and the documents. They can record a milestone of their own, but not edit or remove one — correcting the record stays with your staff. They do not get your buy price, the kickback or your profit. Those are stripped by the server for every account that is not Staff, regardless of what their role says, so there is no setting here to get wrong.
That is worth knowing in the specific case of the referrer: the partner who is owed the kickback cannot read the kickback figure off the booking. What they are owed is a conversation between you and them, not a number the system publishes.
Kickback is priced, not paid
Setting a referrer does not move any money. The kickback on each container line is part of how a shipment's profit is calculated — sell − buy − kickback — so that the margin you see is the margin you actually keep. Paying it is something you do outside Shipina.