Maritime Digitised Procurement. Invoice Control Was Left Behind.
Why the PO side of maritime procurement has been transformed while the invoice side has not, and what that structural gap costs ship managers as fleet size increases.
By Errikos Andreakos
Chief Commercial Officer for MarTrust
This article is part of our series on how to close the control gap in maritime's procure to pay workflow (article one of seven)
Why is maritime accounts payable difficult to automate?
Maritime AP automation is difficult because the procure-to-pay process splits across three separate functions: procurement owns the supplier and purchase order, operations own delivery, and finance owns invoice approval and payment. Matching requires information from all three across disconnected systems, inboxes, and teams. No single workflow contains the full picture, which is why invoice control migrates to email.
Invoice management remains a largely manual process
The PO side of maritime procurement has had a decade of genuine investment. Supplier networks, e-procurement platforms, catalogue integrations. By the time a purchase order goes out today, the supplier is vetted, the price is agreed, the quantity is specified, and the order sits in a system built to track it.
The invoice side of that same process has not received the same attention.
For many ship managers and operators, what happens when an invoice arrives looks nothing like what happened when the PO went out. Matching happens in spreadsheets. Approvals are forwarded by email. Delivery confirmations are chased across time zones. Variances get resolved through correspondence chains between AP, procurement, superintendents, and vessels that run for days.
SpecTec's 2026 research across 20 operators managing 3,150 vessels found something consistent: superintendents spend 40 percent of their working week on data administration, downloading reports, merging spreadsheets, cross-referencing budget records.
Marcura's own analysis suggests as much as half of that time is spent buried in email threads on invoicing related queries.
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Why the two halves of the process work differently
The answer to why is structural. In most industries, procurement and finance sit within the same reporting line. Maritime works differently. Procurement sits close to operations because purchasing decisions come from technical managers, superintendents, and vessel requirements. Finance enters later, at the invoice and payment stage.
The result is a procure-to-pay process owned by three separate teams.
Procurement owns the supplier and the PO. Operations owns the delivery reality. Finance owns invoice approval and payment. Invoice matching needs all three to work together. In most organisations, no shared workflow connects them.
The information needed to validate any invoice sits across disconnected systems, inboxes, and teams rather than inside a single process. Tracing a payment back to its originating PO may mean reconstructing information manually across several systems.
Analyst firm Ardent Partners' benchmarking puts industry-average invoice processing time at 9.2 days. Best-in-class teams have brought it to 3.1. That three-fold gap is what manual exception handling costs at scale.
Where the exposure accumulates
Accepted variances. Duplicate payments. Delayed reconciliations. Fragmented audit trails. Payment fraud that enters through the gaps between teams.
The invoice control gap is not an AP efficiency problem. It is a question of whether financial control can keep up with operational scale.
The full picture, including what the gap costs, where it appears, and what closing it requires, is covered in The Maritime Control Gap, Marcura's guide for finance controllers in professional ship management. Get your copy today
The invoice control gap is not an AP efficiency problem. It is a question of whether financial control can keep up with operational scale.
Learn why leading ship managers are using Marcura to get a single view of every order from requestion to payment
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