Introduction
What Routel is, who it is for, and how the modules fit together.
Routel is a freight forwarding platform. It runs the full life of a shipment, from the first quotation to the last payment, and keeps your books current from the same data. It grew out of the internal system that Flamingo Global, a freight forwarder in Malaysia, uses every day, and it is now offered to other forwarders as a hosted service.
Why Routel
Most forwarders run on a patchwork: a spreadsheet of rates, a template for quotations, another for the Bill of Lading, an accounting package that someone updates at month end, and a shared drive of PDFs. Every hand-off between those tools is a place where a number gets re-typed or a document gets lost.
Routel keeps one record of the job and lets every department work on it:
- Sales stores route rates and turns them into quotations.
- Operations converts the quotation into a job, books the vessel, tracks containers and generates the House Bill of Lading.
- Accounting invoices the customer, records vendor costs and overheads, and reads reports that are computed live from those entries.
- Management sees profitability per job, per customer and for the company.
Because everything posts to one General Ledger as it happens, there are no manual journal entries and no second set of numbers to reconcile.
The modules
| Module | What it does | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Shipments & Jobs | The core record: POL/POD, vessel and voyage, containers, B/L numbers, ETD/ETA, status timeline, audit log | Read |
| Quotations & Route Rates | Vendor buying rates by route and container type with validity windows; quotations that convert to jobs | Read |
| Bookings | Vessel bookings tied to a job | Read |
| Invoicing & Finance | Multi-currency invoicing (MYR/USD), payments, credit and debit notes, credit limits, Receivables & Payables hub | Read |
| Accounting Reports | General Ledger, Trial Balance, Cash Position, P&L, AR aging, overdue invoices, customer profitability | Read |
| Bill of Lading | Carrier-style House B/L with annexure and container sheet, generated from the job | Read |
| Expenses & Payroll | Company overheads that post to operating-expense accounts; salary lines linked to staff | Read |
| Vendors & Customers | Partner records, statements of account as PDF, vendor cost per job with FX conversion | Read |
| Document Management | Files attached per shipment | Read |
| Role-based Access | Admin, Management, Accounting, Operations and Sales roles, enforced everywhere | Read |
| AI Assistant | Chat in Arabic or English to do real work, with confirmation before anything is saved | Read |
How a job flows
Quote
Sales picks a buying rate for the route and container type and issues a quotation to the customer.
Job
The accepted quotation is converted into a job. The route, equipment and pricing carry over.
Book and ship
Operations records the vessel booking, containers and seal numbers, and attaches documents as they arrive.
Bill of Lading
The House B/L and its container annexure are generated from the job data.
Invoice and cost
Accounting invoices the customer in MYR or USD and records vendor costs against the job, converted at the recorded exchange rate.
Report
Gross profit, net income, aging and cash position update themselves from the entries above.
Currencies
Invoices and books run in MYR and USD. Vendor costs recorded in a different currency are converted with the exchange rate captured on the job, so job profitability compares like with like.
Where to start
- If you run operations, start with Shipments & Jobs.
- If you run the books, start with Invoicing & Finance.
- If you want to know what the assistant can and cannot do, read AI Assistant.
These docs are growing
Pages marked "soon" in the sidebar describe a module that is built and working, but whose detailed guide is still being written.