Price volatility doesn’t create operational problems. It reveals ones that already exist. Teams that are slow to settle, prone to measurement disputes, or quietly absorbing demurrage claims have always been losing money. At $90 oil, they’re just losing significantly more of it.
When oil prices move — sharply, suddenly, in either direction — most of the industry’s attention goes to supply, to geopolitics, to what happens next. That’s understandable. But for the teams responsible for moving physical barrels from production to delivery, there’s a quieter and more controllable question that rarely gets asked: how much are we losing between measurement and invoice?
The answer, at current prices, is more than most organizations realize. And the size of that loss isn’t determined by the oil price itself. It’s determined by how tightly the nomination-to-invoice workflow is run.
| $90 Current Brent crude (March 2026) | 3–5 days Typical invoice cycle gap | $800K+ Avg. annual ROI for Navarik customers |
The workflow gap that oil prices don’t create, they expose
Every oil cargo movement involves a sequence of steps between the moment an inspection is nominated and the moment an invoice goes out. Inspectors are appointed. Measurements are taken. Certificates are issued. Data is transmitted, reviewed, and entered into systems. Time logs are captured for demurrage calculations. And somewhere in that chain, for most organizations, there are gaps.
Those gaps exist at every oil price. A nomination that sits in an inbox waiting for manual confirmation wastes the same amount of time whether oil is at $60 or $90. A measurement dispute that takes two weeks to resolve has the same administrative cost regardless of market conditions. A demurrage claim that gets absorbed because the time logs were incomplete is a process failure, not a price story.
What changes when oil prices rise is the financial consequence of those gaps. The underlying inefficiency doesn’t get worse. The number attached to it does.
What a slow workflow actually costs at $90 oil
Let’s use a concrete example. Consider a mid-sized cargo operator handling 200 marine nominations per month (a typical volume for an integrated trader or independent refiner).
Invoice cycle delay
If the average cargo is 500,000 barrels and the nomination-to-invoice cycle is three days slower than it needs to be, that’s three days of working capital tied up per cargo. At $90/bbl, a 500,000-barrel cargo represents $45 million in receivables. Three days of delay at a working capital rate of 5% annually costs approximately $18,500 per cargo.
Across 200 monthly nominations, not all of them marine and not all of that scale, but even assuming 20 cargoes of meaningful size, that’s a working capital cost of over $370,000 per month from invoice cycle delay alone.
At $60 oil, the same delay costs $245,000. The workflow hasn’t changed. The cost has increased by more than 50%.
Measurement disputes
Measurement disputes are a routine feature of oil cargo operations. In most organizations they’re managed reactively: a discrepancy is identified, a claim process begins, and weeks of back-and-forth follows.
The direct cost of a disputed cargo varies widely, but a 0.1% quantity variance on a 500,000-barrel cargo at $90/bbl is $45,000. If disputes aren’t identified and resolved quickly, because the data trail is fragmented across emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets, the window to submit a valid claim closes, and the loss is absorbed.
The teams that recover measurement losses consistently don’t work harder on disputes. They work faster. The difference is having clean, auditable data available at the point of measurement, not two weeks later when someone finally reconciles the spreadsheet.
Demurrage claims left on the table
Demurrage is one of the least visible and most significant costs in oil cargo operations. When a vessel is delayed beyond its agreed laytime, the cargo owner is entitled to demurrage compensation from the counterparty. But demurrage claims depend entirely on accurate time logs and time logs are only as good as the workflow that produces them.
Teams that rely on manual time log collection via phone calls, emails, and paper records, routinely lose demurrage claims not because the delay didn’t happen, but because the documentation isn’t clean enough to support the claim. At typical demurrage rates of $20,000-$50,000 per day for a VLCC, a single poorly documented port call can cost more than the annual licence fee of the software that would have prevented it.
Why this is a workflow problem, not a market problem
It’s tempting to treat these costs as an unavoidable feature of operating in a volatile commodity market. They’re not. They’re operational costs produced by specific, identifiable gaps in the nomination-to-invoice workflow and they can be reduced.
The teams that settle fastest, dispute least, and recover the most from demurrage claims don’t do it by working harder. They do it by having a workflow that produces clean, complete, auditable data at every step so that invoices can go out immediately, disputes can be resolved on evidence, and demurrage calculations happen automatically from timestamped records rather than after-the-fact reconstruction.
The distinction matters because it changes what the solution looks like. If these were market problems, the answer would be to wait for prices to stabilize. Since they’re workflow problems, the answer is to fix the workflow and to do it now, while the financial stakes make the investment case clearest.
What a tight nomination-to-invoice workflow looks like
The operational difference between teams that manage these costs well and those that don’t isn’t scale or sophistication. It comes down to a few specific practices.
- Nominations are complete at creation. Every field from inspector, scope, transport mode details, and counterparty information is completed before the nomination is issued. Incomplete nominations create confirmation delays that cascade through the entire workflow.
- Confirmation is a data quality gate, not just a scheduling step. When an inspection company confirms a nomination, they’re also confirming scope, equipment, and access. Teams that treat confirmation as a structured workflow step have significantly fewer disputes at the measurement stage.
- Measurement data flows directly into settlement systems. Rather than arriving as a PDF attachment that someone manually enters into a CTRM or ERP, validated inspection data is transmitted digitally and immediately available for invoice generation. The invoice goes out the same day the data arrives.
- Time logs are captured continuously. Port event timestamps, NOR tender, pilot on board, hoses connected, hoses disconnected, are recorded in real time, not reconstructed from memory. Demurrage calculations happen automatically against those records.
- Losses and gains are reconciled automatically. The difference between bill of lading and out-turn quantities is calculated against a standardised method immediately after measurement data is received. Discrepancies above a defined threshold trigger an alert, not a month-end report.
The ROI case at current prices
Navarik customers report an average annual ROI of $800,000 from improvements in settlement speed, dispute reduction, and demurrage recovery. And that figure was not calculated at $90 oil.
When the same workflow improvements are applied at current prices, the working capital benefits of faster invoice cycles increase proportionally. The demurrage recovery figures increase proportionally. The loss recovery figures increase proportionally. The cost of the software does not.
The investment case for a tighter nomination-to-invoice workflow was already strong. At $90 oil, it’s stronger. At $100 oil, which markets have touched in recent weeks, it’s even stronger still. And unlike the oil price, the workflow improvements are permanent.
What to do with this
If your organization is managing nomination-to-invoice workflows through email, spreadsheets, and manual reconciliation, the question isn’t whether you’re losing money. It’s how much. The three numbers that matter most are:
- How many days, on average, between measurement data receipt and invoice issue?
- What percentage of cargo movements generate a measurement dispute, and how long does resolution take?
- What is your demurrage claim success rate, and what percentage of potential claims go unpursued?
If you don’t know those numbers, that itself is a workflow problem. And it’s one that volatile markets will continue to make increasingly expensive.
See what the ROI looks like for your operation Navarik has been trusted by Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Valero, Marathon Petroleum, and Phillips 66 to manage over 10 billion barrels of oil logistics annually. Talk to the team about what a tighter nomination-to-invoice workflow would mean for your operation at current prices. Book a conversation with the Navarik team.