Creating a quote
A quote is where every shipment in Shipina starts — the customer, the route, and the container lines that set the price.
3 min read
On this page
Where a quote starts
Open Quotes in the sidebar and choose New quote. Everything else in Shipina follows from here: a quote becomes a booking, a booking carries the shipment, and the shipment is what you invoice. There is no way to create a booking on its own, and that is deliberate — the price a customer agreed to is the price the booking inherits.
You need the create permission on quotes to see the button. If it is not there, your role does not have it yet; a Company Admin can change that under Settings → Roles.
Who it is for
The customer dropdown lists the customers you have already added. If the one you want is missing, add them under Customers first — a quote cannot be written against a name that is not a record, because the same record is what later gives them a portal login and receives their invoices.
The route
Port of loading and port of discharge search a shared catalogue of ports rather than accepting free text. Type two or three letters of the city or the UN/LOCODE and pick from the list. Both are required.
Cargo description is free text and optional. It is the line a customer reads first when the quote reaches them, so it is worth a sentence even though nothing enforces it.
Container lines are the price
Shipina is ocean freight, so a quote is priced as container lines: one row per container type, with a count. Two 40-foot high cubes and one reefer is two rows, not three.
Each row carries three unit prices:
- Buy — what the carrier or your agent charges you.
- Sell — what you charge the customer.
- Kickback — commission paid out of this shipment, if any. Leave it blank and it counts as nothing.
Prices are per container, not per row, so a row of three at a sell price of 1,200 is 3,600. The totals along the bottom update as you type, and profit is always sell − buy − kickback. Those totals are calculated every time they are shown and never stored, which is why correcting a price on a quote corrects every figure that depends on it at once.
A row only counts once it has a count above zero, a buy price and a sell price. Half-filled rows are ignored rather than rejected, so you can leave one open while you wait for a rate to come back.
What your customer can see
Buy price, kickback and profit never leave your team. The API strips them from anything a customer or a partner reads, whatever their role says, so there is no configuration to get wrong here. A customer looking at this quote sees the sell price and nothing behind it.
Saving
Saving creates the quote as a Draft. Nothing has been sent and nobody outside your team can see it yet. You can keep editing it, and when the numbers are right you mark it as sent — which is the next article.