The Statement of Facts (SOF): the document every demurrage claim lives on
What a Statement of Facts contains, who signs it, why ~99% are still processed by hand, and how SOF quality decides tanker and bulker demurrage claims.
What it is
The SOF is the port call's timestamped diary: arrival, NOR tendered, pilot on board, all fast, hoses connected, cargo commenced, stoppages and their causes, cargo completed, hoses off, departure. It is prepared by the agent and signed by ship, agent and terminal — which is exactly why it carries evidentiary weight: it's the version of events everyone signed at the time.
Every laytime calculation is just the SOF's events run against the charter party's rules. Which events count, which are excluded, and when the clock started — all of it traces to SOF lines.
Why it's still a bottleneck
SOFs arrive as scans, faxes-of-scans and port-specific templates in a dozen formats; industry estimates put ~99% of them through manual processing, at hours per claim, with disputes then argued line-by-line over email for months. Claims under roughly $100k often get horse-traded rather than fought, because the processing cost rivals the claim.
That is a document-extraction problem — the same one AI now solves for invoices. Marevo's engine extracts SOF events, maps them to CP clauses, and produces the laytime statement with each line traceable back to its source timestamp.
Practical SOF discipline
Get remarks on at the time (a disputed stoppage noted on the signed SOF is worth ten later emails) · reconcile ship's log against the agent's SOF before anyone signs · never let a claim go out with an unexplained gap between NOR and laytime commencement — it's the first thing the charterer's analyst attacks.
Find out what your last quarter owes you
Marevo reads your invoices against your contracts and the terminal data, drafts the disputes, and is paid mostly from what actually comes back. The audit itself is free.
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