Ports and Terminals Editing and Proofreading Services

An importer receives a demurrage invoice for four thousand two hundred pounds and cannot understand it. Their containers arrived on the fourteenth. They collected on the twenty-third. Nine days, and they were told they had seven days free. What nobody explained is that the clock started on discharge rather than on arrival, that weekends counted, and that the last two days were charged at three times the first rate.

We edit what ports, terminals and their customers produce — demurrage and storage tariff explanations, free time and gate procedure documents, customer notices and rate change announcements, terminal operating procedures and safety instructions, haulier booking and vehicle access guidance, invoice explanations and dispute correspondence, and the guidance new importers are sent before their first box lands. Our editors work on charges that people only understand after paying them.

The free time and demurrage explanation is what decides whether a terminal is a supplier or an ambush, and its failure is a tariff table with no explanation of when the clock starts. Nobody disputes a rate they understood in advance. We work through these so the starting event is named exactly — discharge, availability, gate-out readiness — since the difference between arrival and availability is routinely two days and the customer is counting from the wrong one; so calendar and working days are distinguished and the treatment of weekends and holidays is stated, because this alone accounts for a large share of the shock; so the escalating tiers are shown with a worked example rather than as a table, given that a customer reading two rates does not multiply them by the right number of days; so what stops the clock is stated as a physical event — gate-out, not booking a haulier — as this is the misunderstanding that costs the most; so the free time is tied to a document the customer can actually see, and the customer is told where to see it; so the notice sent before charges begin gives a date and an amount rather than a reminder; and so the tariff distinguishes demurrage from storage and from quay rent, since these run on different clocks and customers assume they are one charge. Explanations written this way get paid without a call.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including tariffs, customer correspondence and commercial terms. We are editors rather than terminal operators, lawyers or freight specialists, and we offer no view on charges, liability or any dispute. What we can do is make the charge comprehensible before it is incurred.