The dock is where the money starts, so it is where the record starts.
Pieces scanned in against the shipment, given a spot on the floor, counted into that shipper’s stock, and labelled from the record. One of those four also starts the storage clock.
Twelve pieces, a spot each, and one time stamp that matters.
Receiving writes down four things at once: what arrived, where it went, whose it is, and when. The fourth is the one that appears on an invoice sixteen days later.
Stock is held per shipper.
A CFS floor is other people’s cargo standing next to other people’s cargo. Holding stock per shipper is what makes “how much of his is still here” a screen rather than a walk around the building with a clipboard, and it is what lets a storage charge be built for one customer without unpicking the whole floor.
The measurement taken at the door — the cubic metres and the kilos — is the same pair the charge line will quote back later, printed on the line itself.
Receive — HBL AMC-2026-0417 on the demo company, with the scanner in hand- Scan the last of the twelve pieces so the header flips to 12 of 12.
- Let the stamp write itself: 04 Aug 09:12 PDT.
- Open Storage on the same house bill — the free days are already counting from that stamp.
The scan starts the clock. Nothing else is allowed to.
The booking does not start it, nor does the arrival notice, nor the moment somebody typed the receipt into the system after lunch.
Why not the paperwork
A receipt keyed in at five o’clock for cargo that landed at nine in the morning starts the free period on the same date, so that error hides. A receipt keyed in the next morning does not — it hands the customer a free day nobody agreed to, and it does it silently, on every shipment, in the same direction, forever.
Two stamps, two ends of one line
Because the clock is started by a scan that had to happen anyway and stopped by loading that had to happen anyway, the storage line is a subtraction rather than a recollection. That is the entire mechanism, and it is why the charge survives the month end where a wall calendar does not.
Known now rather than in week three.
A shipment received during the call.
A real house bill and a real pallet count are welcome. It is scanned in on a demonstration company, given a spot and labelled, and then moved sixteen days forward to the charge line it produces.