The funds are organised before the job reaches you.
The vessel commits the money to a specific job first. Only then does that job reach you as work you can start. What arrives on your phone already carries the amount held against it, in writing, before you decide anything.
EUR 8,400 is held against this job before you start.What you see before you accept the work
The work happens on the quay. The paperwork happens weeks later, somewhere else.
Provisioning, berth dues, fuel, customs, transfers, the last-minute part flown in from Genoa. You arrange all of it in the moment. The confirmations, the approvals and the reconciliation arrive afterwards, out of order, through a management company that changed accountant in September — and a questioned line gets settled from memory rather than from a record.
Meanwhile you are the one holding the vendor relationships, taking the calls at two in the morning, and standing on the quay at 06:40. Everything that matters is decided there, and almost none of it is written down there. That is the gap.
Certainty before you accept
A job arrives with the committed amount on the face of it. If the vessel has not committed funds that cover it, it does not reach you as startable work at all. The decision in front of you is whether you want the job — not whether its arrangements are in order.
Proof at the moment of handover
You and the crew member each sign on your own phone, on the quay, offline. The dispute three weeks later opens with a record that says what was handed over, to whom, and when — rather than with your word against a galley's.
Nothing to reconstruct
The quote, the receipt, the sign-off and the reconciliation all sit on the same job. The captain and the management company are reading the same record you are, at the same time. There is no status email to write, because the status is the record.
Variance handled in the open
The quote was 8,400 and the invoice came in at 9,150 because the fuel price moved. That gap is flagged on the job and answered there, while everyone can still remember why. It does not turn up as a surprise in an end-of-season reconciliation.
What the guarantee is, and what it is not.
What it is: the vessel's funds are committed to the job before the job becomes yours. The commitment is visible to you, and visible to the owner's side too, so nobody can later claim it was never agreed.
What it is not: BRDG does not pay you, does not hold the money, and does not stand behind the vessel's obligation. We are not a bank, an escrow agent or a factoring house, and any software company that tells you otherwise should be asked for its licence.
The value is that the commitment and the delivery are both on the record, made in the right order, and provable by you without our help. That is a smaller claim than "guaranteed payment", and it is one that will still be true in five years.
How the signed handover worksWhat you get, and what the vessel gets for giving it to you.
This only works if both sides gain something they cannot get on their own. Here it is, without the diagram.
Certainty that the job is funded before you touch it. A handover you can prove without asking anyone's permission. One place where the quote, the receipt and the approval live, so nothing has to be reconstructed later.
Spend that cannot run ahead of what was authorised, sign-off thresholds that are written down instead of remembered, and a record the owner's side can read directly rather than requesting a summary at the end of the season.
Work on the record. Claim the job, post what happened, attach the quote and the receipt, sign at handover. If you already keep a decent log, this is the same effort in a place where it counts for something.
Told straight.
The record underneath — intake, execution, sign-off, receipts, reconciliation, a log written once — runs end to end on the schema that will back it in production, though still against a local data layer rather than a live database. The funding gate and the two-phone signed handover are being built now for November and are not finished. BRDG moves no money and never has.
Nobody is running port calls on this yet. The first vessels will be ones the founder knows personally, and the first agents will be people who told him to his face what was wrong with it.
Half an hour, and the objection you think kills it.
I have worked as a port agent, and as chief officer on a 60m. I am building this because the payment side of the job was the part that made me want to stop. If I have the shape of it wrong, you will know within five minutes of me showing you.
Benjamin J. Yeager · Founder
Groundswell Global Maritime Holdings LLC