What shipped in CrewSmart: January to March 2026

The first quarter of 2026 touched three areas that come up in almost every customer call: the money a breakdown costs, the documents the crew are supposed to have read, and the admin that falls on one person's desk. Here is what changed between January and March.

What a breakdown actually costs

The Vessel Diary now records maintenance hours per day, rolls them up against the contract and by month, and separates breakdown hours so you can see the revenue lost to them. For an operator on a charter with contracted maintenance hours this is the difference between arguing about a number at month end and showing one. Recurring breakdowns on the same vessel stand out quickly once they are on a chart.

IMS, rebuilt

March brought the largest change to the Integrated Management System since version control was added. Three things are new:

• Reviews. Log a review against any document and schedule the next one, so the review cycle your SMS promises is something the system tracks rather than something someone remembers.
• Drag and drop. Files and folders move the way you expect them to.
• Compliance requirements by vessel, contract and project. Assign a crew member to a vessel and they are automatically required to read that vessel's documents. The read-and-acknowledge record follows them, and the office can see who has and has not.

The third of these is the one to look at if you are preparing for Workboat Code 3. It is the mechanism that turns "the crew have access to the procedures" into evidence that each crew member has read the ones that apply to the boat they are on.

Travel documents before you book

Travel authorisations and visas can be stored against a user's travel areas, and a travel overview now appears when you allocate someone to a vessel or project. If a passport or visa will not be valid for the trip, you find out at allocation rather than at the airport. Travel bookings can also be made in different currencies.

Holiday approvals by group

Holiday requests used to go to a single "reporting to" user, which worked until that person was on holiday themselves. Approvals can now go to a user group, set per employment, with a bulk update to assign groups across the whole company in one go. The Holiday Summary page under Employment Overview shows who is set up and who is not.

Smaller changes

• Training records can now be approved, deleted and investigated in the same way as qualifications.
• Defects can be raised against a specific inventory item where several share a framework location; previously the first item in the list was assumed.

Most of this came from customers describing a specific afternoon that went badly. If you have one of those, we would like to hear about it.