A shipping line can be profitable and still run out of money, and it can burn cash for a year while building something worth owning. The finance card on the operations screen has two tabs because those are two different questions.
The result: what sailing earned
The result is built from voyages that have arrived and settled. Each one carries its own cost sheet, written when the ship sailed, so the breakdown is what actually happened rather than a model run afterwards.
The lines are:
Freight revenue — what the shippers paid, less any slot-charter share paid out to a partner.
Bunkers — burn per steaming day at the price you paid, not today's price.
Emission quota — every kilo of fuel burnt costs quota.
Crew — a fixed cost per voyage plus a cost per unit and day. A training centre cuts it.
Maintenance — charged per unit and steaming day, multiplied by how mixed your fleet is. This runs on every voyage and is separate from the surveys and overhauls you order by hand.
Port dues — a call fee that scales with the size of the destination.
Cargo handling — stevedoring, lashing and cleaning, scaled by how much of the ship is reefer or project cargo. A plain dry box is markedly cheaper to handle than a refrigerated one.
Depreciation — what your ships lost in value over those days: 12% of list price per 6,000 steaming hours, the same curve the company valuation uses. This is the one line that did not cost you cash, and the reason the result and the cash flow diverge even in a quiet week. Chartered ships are not depreciated — you do not own them, and the hire is a standing cost instead.
Voyages sailed before cost sheets existed appear as one honest remainder line rather than being spread across the categories by guesswork.
Standing costs: what the company owes
These are charged in the Monday settlement and belong to the company, not to any one voyage, so they cannot be read out of a sailing. They are shown as what they cost per week at your current setup:
Loan interest, from the moment the loan was taken.
Charter hire, for anything you rent rather than own.
Service level — your target multiplied by the capacity in your fleet. This is a commitment, not a purchase; see Facilities.
Shore staff overtime, whenever a terminal handles more calls than its level supports.
The cash flow: what moved through the account
Every change to your balance is recorded with what caused it. This is where a ship purchase appears — it never touches the result, because you swapped cash for an asset of similar value, and yet it can empty the account in an afternoon.
Reading the two tabs against each other is the point:
Profitable result, falling cash: you are buying ships or repaying debt faster than the network earns. Sustainable for a while, on purpose.
Poor result, rising cash: you are borrowing or selling shares. This is survivable and sometimes correct, but it is not a business yet.
Both falling: the network is not paying for itself. Look at the result lines before you look at anything else.
The log keeps the last month. Anything older is discarded, because the interest in a cash movement is entirely in how recent it is.
Borrowing
The lending rate is a market. It wanders the way the bunker price does — a mean it drifts back towards, a floor and a ceiling — and the bank screen carries its history on the same chart the bunker market uses.
Your rate is three things added together:
The market rate on the day you sign.
A premium for how leveraged you already are. Borrowing against a company that is mostly debt costs more, which is the point.
A premium for how long you fix it. Six months costs nothing extra, a year a little, two years more.
You may borrow up to 150% of equity. Interest runs from the moment you sign and comes off when your voyages settle — there is no due date to miss, and sleeping players are never charged for time they did not play.
The term is a bet. When it expires the loan rolls at whatever the market rate is then, plus the same premiums. Fixing short is cheap and leaves you exposed; fixing long costs more and buys certainty. This is the same trade as a bunker contract, and it fails in the same way: cheap right up until the moment it is not.
Repaying before the term is up costs 1% of what you repay. After the term, it costs nothing.