Why a loaded container should be locked in your software

The seal goes on. The truck leaves. And a week later somebody in the office corrects a quantity on a line — fixing an honest mistake — and from that moment the packing list on file no longer matches what is in the box. Nobody notices until the container is opened at the other end. This guide is about the one control that stops it.

The fault is not the correction, it is the timing

Corrections are normal. A shop delivers 78 where the note said 80; a carton was counted twice; a mark was misread. Before loading, a correction is the record catching up with reality. After the seal, the same correction breaks the record: the box has 80, the sheet now says 78, and every document written from that sheet inherits the error.

Spreadsheets have no notion of "after the seal". Anyone with the file can change any cell at any time, and the file never says it was changed.

Lock the container when the doors shut

In Consolly, each container on an order is locked at the moment it is loaded and sealed. From then on:

• no carton can be loaded into it or taken out;
• no quantity, mark or measurement of the goods inside it can be changed;
• the lock records who locked it and when.

The panel says plainly what is frozen and what is not. The loading is final. The vessel, the sailing date and the order's own charges can still be changed, because those are facts about the shipment, not about the box.

What it protects

• The packing list. Written from the loaded cartons, it stays true because the loaded cartons cannot change.
• The commercial invoice and the B/L draft. Same source, same protection.
• The customer's page. The page a customer signs in to see their order shows a container that cannot silently shrink.
• The office's own memory. "Who changed this?" is answered by the lock, not by a meeting.

Unlocking is allowed, and it is loud

Sometimes a locked container genuinely has to be reopened — customs inspection, a mis-declared line. Unlocking is a deliberate act by someone with the right to do it, and it is recorded. The point is not to make correction impossible; it is to make the silent kind impossible.

Where it sits in the order

The lock is on the Loading tab of the load plan, beside the container's number and seal. Loading photographs are kept below it — the open door, the packed box, the seal — so the record of the container is the count, the pictures and the lock, together.

The one-sentence rule

Once the seal is on, the count is a fact, and the software should treat it as one. If yours lets a number change after that, it is a spreadsheet with a login.