Two AP Workflows Are Running in Every Maritime Organisation. Only One Is in Your ERP.
Why the real maritime AP process lives in email rather than the system of record , and what that means for audit trails, approvals, and financial control.
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 three of seven)
Why do maritime companies manage accounts payable outside their ERP?
Most maritime ERPs record the final posted transaction. The operational decisions that produced it generally happen in email. Delivery discrepancies are resolved through supplier correspondence chains. Approval requests are forwarded manually. Vessel confirmations are chased by inbox. The ERP shows a clean process; the inbox shows what actually happened. The gap between them is where audit trails go dark.
Ask a finance controller at a ship management company where the last contested invoice was resolved. In most organisations, the answer is not the ERP. It is an email thread. Or a chain of messages between the AP team and a superintendent. Or a conversation during a port visit that was never documented anywhere.
This is the parallel workflow problem. It is structural, not accidental.
What the ERP records. What it doesn't.
The ERP records outcomes: the matched invoice, the approved payment, the posted transaction. It does not record how those outcomes were reached. The conversation with the supplier about a quantity discrepancy. The email where the superintendent confirmed the delivery. The forwarded approval that sat in someone's inbox over a weekend before the payment run. Those decisions happened. They shaped the outcome. They happened outside the system.
It is not a failure of discipline. It is the natural result of a process that requires simultaneous input from teams with no shared workflow. When a delivery discrepancy needs resolution from a vessel, a supplier, a superintendent, and an AP team at the same time, email becomes the coordination layer because it is the only platform they all share.
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The accountability problem
Finance teams at maritime organisations have been documented checking invoice line items against printed purchase orders using rulers. Not because the technology doesn't exist to do it digitally. Because the information they need to match is across systems that don't talk to each other, and print is the only way to see it together.
The consequences compound. When a CFO or auditor asks what happened with a specific payment, reconstructing the answer means pulling from multiple systems and email accounts. Approval traceability depends on records that were never designed to support it. Process consistency becomes a function of individual behaviour rather than a system-enforced workflow.
For a finance controller, this creates a specific problem. The financial control they are accountable for is being exercised in a medium they cannot audit. Compliance can be demonstrated at the transaction level. The decision chain that produced the transaction is mostly invisible.
Closing this gap does not require a new ERP. It requires connecting decisions that produce financial outcomes into a single workflow rather than letting them migrate to email. McKinsey found leading organisations achieving 39 percent efficiency gains in AP through automation — not because the work got simpler, but because it stopped happening in a medium designed for conversation rather than control.
The Maritime Control Gap covers the five structural areas where this fragmentation creates financial exposure.
Ask a finance controller at a ship management company where the last contested invoice was resolved. In most organisations, the answer is not the ERP.
Improve procure-to-pay control and replace fragmented account payable matching steps with one fully governed end to end workflow.
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