75% of APAC technical managers still run husbandry bills in Excel

Three-quarters of technical managers in APAC still manage husbandry invoices in Excel, against 40% in EMEA — and that spreadsheet gap is now carrying a price tag that can be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars per fleet.

The figures come from Athens-based port cost management platform HarborLab, which was founded in 2020 by Antonis Malaxianakis, a former disbursement department veteran of Thenamaris and Product Shipping & Trading. His diagnosis: shipping has tightened voyage costs, bunker procurement and commercial port expenses for years, but husbandry — bunkering, crew changes, stores at non-commercial calls — has escaped the same scrutiny.

"Husbandry calls have never carried the same profit and loss visibility as commercial port calls," Malaxianakis said. With no cargo revenue to measure expenditure against, these bills have drifted outside the controls applied elsewhere in ship operations.

Why the invoices resist Excel

The complexity is not trivial. A single port call can generate hundreds of pages of documentation, spanning port authorities, pilots, tug operators, customs brokers, bunker suppliers and repair companies. Pricing can vary within the same port, and demurrage, detention, congestion surcharges and equipment rental often surface after the fact.

For Malaxianakis, the problem is not inattentive technical managers but inadequate tools — a gap he says is widest in Asia, where technical managers often hold direct control over day-to-day port expenditure yet lack a live reference against which to check an agent's quote.

"That combination, direct spending authority paired with heavier reliance on manual tools, does leave APAC more exposed to inconsistent pricing," he said. "The decision-maker already controls the budget; they're simply working without the visibility to know whether what's being paid is fair."

That exposure is why APAC has become a priority market for HarborLab.

What does the trial data show?

The company's core commercial claim rests on a controlled three-month trial with one customer: half the fleet stayed on its existing disbursement account process, half moved to HarborLab. The managed vessels generated $220,000 in savings, against $70,000 on the untouched half — a difference of $150,000 in a single quarter for one operator's fleet.

"The gap isn't down to one single lever, but the largest multiplier is benchmarking," Malaxianakis said.

His argument turns on a distinction shippers and operators know well from other spend categories. "Manual review, however careful, can only check an invoice against a tariff document or a prior year's DA; it can confirm a charge matches what was quoted, not whether the quote itself was fair."

In other words, an invoice can be perfectly consistent with a tariff and still be overpriced relative to comparable calls. HarborLab positions that second layer — was the quote reasonable? — as where most of the recoverable money sits.

How solid is the benchmarking?

Here the skeptic's caveat applies, and HarborLab has at least attempted to answer it. Comparing port calls is not like comparing a bunker price or a commodity rate; local tariffs, vessel types and port-specific requirements mean two superficially similar services can legitimately cost very different amounts.

Malaxianakis concedes that broad averages would create a new problem rather than solve the old one. "Every benchmark is built at the level of port, vessel type, and expense category, not as one blended number, so a crane charge on an MR tanker at Tarragona is a different data point from the same charge on a bulker at Rotterdam," he said.

The platform draws on a database built from more than 40,000 port calls across over 1,400 ports. HarborLab says its analysts obtain and verify official tariffs directly with ports rather than relying solely on historical invoices, and comparisons run against previously approved disbursement accounts for comparable ports and vessel types. Tariffs carry confidence indicators showing technical managers whether the underlying figure has been independently verified — a useful transparency mechanism, though the verification depth across 1,400 ports is the company's own assertion.

The system also flags incorrect and duplicated charges, with HarborLab taking discrepancies back to agents to convert findings into credits.

"Local variation is built into the comparison rather than smoothed over," Malaxianakis said.

What is not said

Some gaps remain. The trial covers one customer over three months; HarborLab has not published results across its broader client base, and the $220,000 figure is unaudited company data. Nor does the source specify what share of the savings came from benchmarking versus simple error and duplicate detection — the "largest multiplier" claim is directional, not quantified.

Still, the structural observation holds regardless of the vendor. A sector that now scrutinises fuel consumption, vessel performance and voyage economics with granular data still lets a large slice of shore-side spend arrive as PDFs into inboxes. As Malaxianakis puts it, in husbandry there is still plenty sitting in the spreadsheet — and if the APAC/EMEA gap narrows even partway, the addressable savings pool is substantial.

— Marcus Bennett