Managing Parties

Parties are the companies on your trade documents - the shippers (exporters) who send goods and the consignees (importers) who receive them. CargoLint saves them so the same company and address can be recalled instead of re-typed on every document. Unlike the product catalog, parties are learned: approving a document saves them automatically. You can also manage them by hand from the Parties page.

Before you start

• You’ve approved at least one document, so you have parties to work with - or you’re ready to add parties manually

Steps

1. Open the Parties page

Parties in the sidebar lists every party you’ve saved. Each row shows the company Name, its Roles, Location, Tax ID, and when it was last Updated. Click any column header to sort; click again to reverse. Use the search box to filter by name, street, city, or postal code.

2. Understand where parties come from

Most parties arrive on their own. When you approve a document, CargoLint saves its shipper (the Vendor or Exporter) and its consignee (the Customer) as parties, matching by company and address so it never duplicates one already on file.

A party isn’t fixed to a single role. The same company can be the shipper on one shipment and the consignee on another, so the Shipper and Consignee roles accumulate: a company seen in both ends up tagged with both. Roles are a record of how a company has been used, not a restriction on how it can be used.

3. Add a party manually

Click Add Party and fill in the company Name and address. Tick the Roles it plays - Shipper, Consignee, or both. If a company with the same name and address is already on file, CargoLint flags it as a duplicate and offers to edit the existing party instead, so the same company is never entered twice. Saving is held until you resolve the prompt or change the details.

4. Filter by role

Use the All / Shippers / Consignees pills above the table to narrow the list to the parties that play a given role - handy when you’re picking a shipper or reviewing who you import from.

5. Edit or delete a party

Use the pencil icon to correct a company’s details (changes apply everywhere it’s recalled) or the trash icon to remove it. Deletes are permanent.

6. Reuse parties during review

In the Review Queue, the shipper and consignee fields recall your parties as you type a name or address, so a known company fills in with one click. CargoLint also watches for near-matches and warns you: the same address under a different company (“same company?”) or the same company at a different address (“did it move?”), so you can fix typos and keep your parties clean.

Tip: Let your parties build themselves. Approving documents populates them accurately; reach for Add Party mainly to register a company before its first document arrives.

Tip: If two rows turn out to be the same company, edit one to match and delete the other - the duplicate prompt keeps new entries clean, but it won’t merge entries that already exist.

What’s next

• Managing the Product Catalog - The curated catalog of products, scoped to your shippers
• Products and Parties - The concept behind parties and the catalog: learned vs curated
• How to Review Documents - Where parties are recalled and collisions are flagged
• Working with Shipments - Group a shipment’s documents and check them against each other