Short answer: ship chandlery breaks ordinary wholesale ERP in three specific places — the catalogue is ordered by IMPA and ISSA code, the quotation has to come back while the vessel is still in port, and part of the stock sits under customs bond. TABSYST implements ERPNext around those three realities rather than around a generic trading flow.
Most ERP sold to chandlers is distribution software with a marine label on the box. It assumes a stable catalogue, a customer who orders the same things every month, and a delivery address that does not move. A chandler has none of that: the catalogue is effectively the whole ship’s stores list, the customer is a different vessel every time, and the delivery address sails away.
A request for quotation arrives — through a marine procurement platform such as ShipServ, through the technical superintendent, or as a spreadsheet from the agent — and it can run to several hundred lines across provisions, bonded stores, deck stores, engine stores and cabin stores. The port call may be a matter of hours. Whoever prices it accurately and first tends to get the order.
That makes RFQ turnaround the single highest-value thing to automate, and it depends entirely on whether your catalogue is machine-matchable:
The substitution history is worth more than it looks. The items you keep substituting are, quarter after quarter, the clearest possible list of what you should be stocking.
Duty-suspended goods move under customs supervision. In ERP terms they need their own warehouse with its own controls: bonded and duty-paid stock held in genuinely separate locations, the customs documentation that authorised each movement attached to that movement, and a hard stop on the two being netted together in a stock report. A chandler who discovers the difference at stock-take has a customs problem, not an accounting one.
UAE VAT is 5% as standard, and UAE VAT legislation provides for zero-rating on certain supplies connected with qualifying means of transport — commercial vessels among them — as well as on exports. The practical consequence for a chandler is awkward: a single delivery can carry lines whose correct treatment differs.
The fix is to configure the rules so the treatment is derived from the customer, the vessel and the nature of the supply, rather than remembered by whoever is raising the invoice at two in the morning. Because the details turn on your specific circumstances, confirm the treatment you apply with your tax adviser or against current FTA guidance — and then encode that answer once, in the system, where it cannot be forgotten.
Delivery is to a vessel alongside, at anchorage, or via the agent — and the document that closes the job is a delivery note signed on board. Until that signed proof is attached to the transaction, the invoice is disputable and the receivable is at risk. Capture it against the delivery, not in a folder, and the collections conversation stops being an argument about whether the goods arrived.
Chandlers routinely buy provisions and stores in cash terms and invoice owners or managers on much longer ones. That gap is the real working-capital risk in the business, and it is managed with ageing by principal rather than by vessel, credit limits that actually block an order, and a clear view of margin per voyage once the substitutions and the freight are in. Perishable provisions add batch and expiry tracking with a cold chain behind it.
Chandlers rarely serve one port. Fujairah and Sharjah, then Doha, Manama, Dammam, Sohar — and every country taxes the work differently: the UAE 5% with e-invoicing mandatory for larger businesses from January 2027, Bahrain 10%, Saudi Arabia 15% with ZATCA clearance, and Qatar with no VAT at all. Multi-company and per-country tax configuration in one system is what keeps margin per vessel and per principal visible across the group.
Ship chandlery is one part of a wider marine picture. Our marine ERP guide also covers shipping agencies, shipyards and marine contracting — dredging, reclamation and plant hire — and our UAE implementation service covers the delivery side.
Three things. The catalogue is ordered against IMPA and ISSA codes, so those codes must live on the item master as searchable identifiers rather than as a note in a description field. The clock is short — an RFQ can run to hundreds of lines against a port call measured in hours, so pricing speed decides whether you win the order. And part of the stock sits under customs bond, which cannot be treated as ordinary inventory. A general wholesale ERP handles none of these natively.
Yes, once the codes are held as structured fields on the item master rather than buried in text. An incoming requisition is then matched line by line against your catalogue, priced from the relevant price list, and returned as a quotation in one pass instead of being retyped. Lines with no match are flagged for a buyer to source or substitute, so nothing is silently dropped from the quote.
Record the requested item and the supplied item as two distinct references on the same line. That keeps the quotation readable against the vessel’s original list, gives the master an auditable record of what was actually delivered, and lets you see which requested items you keep substituting — usually the strongest signal of what you should be stocking.
Not uniformly, and that is exactly why it needs handling per line rather than per customer. UAE VAT is 5% as standard, and UAE VAT legislation provides for zero-rating on certain supplies connected with qualifying means of transport, including commercial vessels, as well as on exports. One delivery note can therefore contain lines with different correct treatments. Configure the rules so the treatment is derived rather than remembered, and confirm your specific circumstances with your tax adviser or against current FTA guidance.
As a separate warehouse with its own controls, not as a shelf in the main store. Bonded goods move under customs supervision, so the system must keep bonded and duty-paid stock in distinct locations, record the customs documentation authorising each movement, and prevent the two being netted together in a stock report. Getting this wrong is a customs problem before it is an accounting problem.
Yes, and it is usually the reason to consolidate. Each country taxes differently — the UAE 5% with e-invoicing mandatory for larger businesses from January 2027, Bahrain 10%, Saudi Arabia 15% with ZATCA clearance, and Qatar with no VAT at all — so multi-company and per-country tax configuration in one system is what keeps margin per vessel and per principal visible across the group.
Tell us which ports you serve, roughly how many RFQ lines you handle in a week, and whether you hold bonded stock. We will map it to a fixed-scope ERPNext quote.
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