Quick summary

Operating out of Perth, Monson Shipping Agencies oversees port calls for bulk vessels alongside the full disbursement billing process. Over ten years, two acquisitions and expansion across nine overseas markets, the business stayed on its core financial stack. Rather than leaving acquired businesses on separate accounting platforms, Monson brought every entity onto OnAccount and implemented a bespoke FX module, simplifying daily operations for both finance teams and customers.

Monson runs shipping agency services for bulk vessels out of a head office in Perth. A vessel gets nominated into a port, Monson arranges everything that has to happen while it is there, then bills the operator for the lot.

The billing is the hard part. One port call picks up costs from a handful of suppliers, there is often a customer deposit sitting against it, and the customer wants a single settled account with every supporting document attached. That is the job OnAccount does alongside full financial management, recording disbursements against a nomination and building billing reports with the paperwork already included.

Today that covers ten countries: Australia, New Zealand, China, the United States, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, trading under the Monson, Meridian, VertomCory and Filette Green shipping services brands.

Where it all started

Monson went live on OnAccount in 2016 as a single Australian business, with a finance team of seven the year before. What went in was a bespoke Work in Progress and Disbursements module wired into Monson Bridge, Monson's nominations management system, so disbursements and prepaid funds could be recorded against a nomination. The 2018 story covers this first phase.

Over the years Monson grew, starting with Gold Co, a private equity group, which bought Monson in 2021 and pushed it out through Asia Pacific, which took OnAccount into China, Singapore and the Philippines alongside Australia. Then in 2023, Gold Co was itself bought by VertomCory, a Netherlands-based shipping group, and the Meridian Port Agency subsidiaries in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia came into the same structure.

The challenge: A group growing faster than its finance systems

Leave a growing group alone and you get ten countries doing the same job ten slightly different ways. That is roughly where Monson was heading. Every acquisition came with its own finance systems and its own habits, each new market it opened set up its own arrangements, and consolidated reporting for the group was being pulled together by manual methods.

Standardising all of that is harder than it sounds, for three reasons.

1. Currency against a single nomination

Moving into South East Asia meant Monson had to transact, revalue and report in more than one currency on the same vessel. The currency used at the port for invoicing didn’t always match what was agreed with the customer. Three of the currencies Monson reports in, the Japanese yen, the New Taiwan dollar and the Namibian dollar, belong to countries it does not operate in at all. Another three, the Indonesian rupiah, the Thai baht and the Vietnamese dong, are currencies costs land in that no customer ever gets billed in. Plenty of finance systems handle multi-currency. Handling it down at nomination level, where several suppliers and one customer agreement all land on the same job, is a different problem.

2. Local compliance, ten ways

Withholding works differently in every jurisdiction, so a compliant set of books in Vietnam looks nothing like a compliant set of books in Australia. The complexity of standardising compliance can never come at the cost of disregarding local compliance requirements.

3. The systems that come with an acquisition

Acquired entities turn up on general accounting packages with no concept of a job, which means work in progress cannot be read per vessel and has to be pieced back together before anyone can explain it. Monson knew that one from its own history.

The solution: One configuration tailored to Monson’s operations

Monson's answer was to put OnAccount into every entity and configure each one to local requirements, while leaving the core configuration principles alone.

The OA bespoke FX module is wired into Monson Bridge, which allows South East Asian entities to record nominations, transact, revalue, and report across multiple currencies against a single nomination. Monson runs eleven transaction currencies and eleven reporting currencies.

API integration with Lucanet replaced the manual consolidation. Group reporting for VertomCory runs through it now.

The job and WIP model was inherited by every entity. Nomination estimates are posted from Monson Bridge to a WIP page in OnAccount, and each job tracks its estimated cost, customer deposit, actual supplier cost, customer invoice, and final payment. A new entity gets all of that on day one.

Document packs the system builds itself so when a job finishes, OnAccount pulls together one pack with the cover letter, customer invoice, payment details and copies of every supplier invoice. That is what the customer gets, and it is what an auditor asks for.

The results

Monson grew in several directions at once, and each one tested the finance system differently.

6,200 to 12,000 document packs a month

Pack volume roughly doubled between 2016 and 2026, with about nine supporting documents in each one, so OnAccount is now assembling in the order of 108,000 documents a month and nobody is managing them by hand.

7 people in finance in 2015, 32 across ten countries today

Through two acquisitions, the team went up roughly fourfold and the country count tenfold, with no finance migration to work around. That is not how it usually goes. The buyer's stack normally wins, the acquired business migrates, and the migration can take months. For Monson, OnAccount was configurable enough to absorb the acquired businesses' processes as they came in and was completed in weeks rather than months, making it the easier path to migrate and train the rest of the group on it.

4 new entities configured and deployed to test in weeks

Each entity meets its own local requirements without anyone forking the system to get there while the OA Work in Progress module reads per vessel.

"Put it in OnAccount, everything is clear, everything is clean. We don't have that issue anymore. We don't have to spend days, hours trying to figure out whether something balances or not."

Ken Mo, APAC Financial Controller at Monson Shipping Agencies

Volume, headcount, geography and ownership all grew over ten years, and OnAccount kept up with each of them.

Working together

The OnAccount team on the account is the same one that built the original disbursements module back in 2016. Ten years, two changes of ownership and nine new countries later, nobody at Monson has had to explain again what a nomination is, how a disbursement gets settled, or why one customer's tax treatment is not the same as the next one's.

"Any issues, any time we shoot a question over, they definitely answer quite promptly. We haven't had many issues with them not responding and ghosting us."

Ken Mo, APAC Financial Controller at Monson Shipping Agencies

The harder problems get the same treatment. Withholding rules differ in every jurisdiction, and each one has to be worked through on its own terms.