Documents on a booking
Uploading the paperwork that travels with the cargo, and generating a Bill of Lading from what is already on the booking.
3 min read
On this page
Everything in one place
A shipment collects paperwork from every direction — the packing list from the shipper, the customs declaration from the broker, the bill of lading from the carrier. The documents card on a booking is where they live, so that finding one is opening the booking rather than searching an inbox.
Each document is tagged with what it is: Bill of Lading, Commercial Invoice, Packing List, Customs Declaration, or Other. The tag is what makes a pile of PDFs readable six months later.
What you can upload
Paperwork, and pictures of paperwork: a PDF, or a PNG, JPEG, WebP or TIFF scan or photo, up to 15 MB each. Anything else is refused, and it is refused on what the file actually is rather than on its name — renaming a document to .pdf does not get it in.
That is deliberate. These files are handed on to your customers and partners, so the narrower the set of things that can be stored here, the less this card can ever be used to pass something unwanted along.
Generating a Bill of Lading
Shipina can draw the Bill of Lading itself from what is already on the booking — the parties, the route, the vessel, the containers. It is a generated document rather than a scan, so it is legible, consistent and takes no retyping.
The same generator produces the invoice PDF, covered in the next section. Both are drawn under your own letterhead: the company name, website and contact details from Settings → Company, with your logo above them if you have uploaded one and left "Print it on generated documents" on.
Pressing the button again redraws the document rather than adding a second copy: the new PDF replaces the last one Shipina generated for that booking or that invoice. A Bill of Lading you uploaded yourself is never touched by this — only Shipina's own copy is replaced.
The other thing that removes a generated PDF is moving the booking to another customer: the document prints the old customer on every page, so it is deleted rather than carried over, and you draw it again afterwards.
This is a plan feature. If document generation is not part of your plan the button is not there; everything else on this page still works, and you can upload a Bill of Lading you produced elsewhere exactly as before.
Persian names and descriptions come out right
If your customers' names, your company name or an extra-cost description are written in Persian, they appear correctly in the generated PDFs — right to left, with the letters joined, and with the numbers and English labels around them still reading in the right order. This is worth mentioning only because it is the thing most systems get wrong, and a Bill of Lading with a mangled consignee name is not a document you can hand anybody.
Where files are stored
Uploaded files are held by your Shipina instance. A document cannot be removed once it is uploaded, so it is worth checking you have the right file before you upload it.
Everything on this card counts towards your plan's file storage, alongside support ticket attachments — the File storage meter on Billing is the total, and an upload that would take you past it is refused with that limit named.
Who can see what
A customer sees the documents on their own bookings. A partner sees the documents on bookings where they hold one of the three partner slots. Neither sees anything on a booking that is not theirs.
Every download is written to your company's activity log, whoever made it — staff, customer or partner — along with which file and when (see The activity log). It is the one act of reading anywhere in Shipina that is recorded, because a file leaving the building is the thing asked about afterwards.