What Is a Booking Note

This page covers the terms and ideas used everywhere else in this documentation. The Glossary holds short definitions for quick reference.

What a booking note is

A booking note covers a single request. It brings together the participants involved, the route and dates, the equipment needed and the goods being carried, so that everything required to book the shipment sits in one record rather than being scattered across emails and attachments.

Some organizations call the same record a booking request, particularly while it is awaiting approval. Open Nexus uses booking note throughout, and so does this documentation.

See the Global Glossary for terms used across Open Nexus.

Who is on a booking note

Four participants are recorded in the General Information section. In Open Nexus a participant is an organization, and each one is selected from those available rather than typed in as free text:

Two of these also determine how the booking note behaves. The Shipper and the Freight Forwarding Agent are the two sides of the working relationship: one of them is always the current organization and is filled in automatically, and the other is selected. The Freight Forwarding Agent is the participant the booking note goes to for a decision.

This is what makes a booking note a shared record. It is visible and workable from both sides, but each side can only do what its role allows. See Roles and Permissions.

Participant references

Shipper Reference and Consignee Reference hold references belonging to the participant selected above them. Each becomes available once its participant is chosen, and shows No references available until then.

Both are optional. They are the fields most often used to match a booking note against records held elsewhere, so they should be completed wherever a reference exists.

Source

The source is how the booking note came into the system. There are three:

Source matters for two reasons. It determines whether the system pre-fills the form, and it determines whether the original document or email is shown alongside the form for reference. Manually created notes have no source content to display.

Status

Every booking note has exactly one status at a time, and the status controls what can be done with it. A note being read by the system cannot be edited. A note that has been approved cannot be changed. The full set of statuses and the rules for moving between them are on the What Each Status Means page.

How the form is organized

The booking note form is divided into sections: File Information, General Information, Sailing Information, Containers and Cargo. Each can be collapsed while work continues elsewhere.

Two sections repeat. A booking note can hold several container types (for example, two 40ft containers and one 20ft) and several cargo entries (a separate entry for each distinct set of goods). Add as many of each as the shipment needs. See Containers and Cargo /en/booking-notes-module/booking-note-form/containers-cargo).

Reading documents and emails automatically

When a booking note is created from an upload or an email, the system reads the source and fills in whatever fields it can recognize. This is not a guarantee of accuracy: extracted values are a starting point that must be checked. Anything the system could not find is left empty for completion by hand. See How Documents and Emails Are Read.

Dangerous goods

Cargo classified as dangerous requires regulatory information that ordinary cargo does not. Marking a cargo entry as dangerous reveals additional fields, some of which are mandatory. This is set per cargo entry, not per booking note, so a single note can mix dangerous and non-dangerous cargo. See Dangerous Goods.