Crew management
Seafarer records, documents and certificates, and employment lifecycle status.
Crew management is the core of SeaSquad CMS: a single register of every seafarer the organization employs, the documents held on file for them, and where each person sits in the employment lifecycle.
The crew record
Each seafarer has one record on the register, identified by a unique staff code. A record holds:
- Personal details — full name, contact information, date of birth, nationality, and address.
- Identity and travel documents — passport number and expiry, CDC (Continuous Discharge Certificate) number and expiry.
- Next-of-kin details.
- Current rank.
- The date they joined.
- A photo, shown alongside the record in the register.
A crew record can come into existence three ways: a candidate hired through the recruitment pipeline, a bulk import when an operator first onboards onto SeaSquad CMS, or manual entry by a crewing officer. Regardless of how a record originated, it is managed identically from that point on.
Employment status
Every crew record carries a status that reflects where the person stands:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
active | Currently employed and eligible for assignment. |
inactive | Not currently active, but retained on the register (temporarily unavailable, not yet fully offboarded). |
left | No longer employed by the organization. |
The register is a permanent record — crew are not deleted when they leave. History, past assignments, and document trails stay intact for reference and reporting.
Documents and certificates
Each crew member has a set of documents held against their record — passports, CDCs, certificates of competency, medical certificates, STCW certificates, CVs, contracts, and other supporting files. Every document carries:
- A document type and an optional label.
- A document number, where applicable.
- Issue and expiry dates.
- The issuing authority.
- A verification status — pending, verified, or rejected — recording whether a crewing officer has checked the document.
Verification carries forward rather than resetting. If a document was already verified during an application's review, it is not re-verified from scratch just because the person was hired — the verification record notes where the check happened, so the office can still filter for documents that have only ever been checked at one stage.
When a document is renewed — a passport is reissued, a certificate is renewed — the new document supersedes the old one, and the prior version stays available as part of the record's history rather than being overwritten.
Because every document carries an expiry date, the register can support office-wide visibility into documents that are approaching or past expiry, which is one of the inputs into the notification platform.
Who can do what
Read and write access to crew records and documents is governed by role. Office staff generally have broad read access to the register, while create, update, and delete rights vary by role — see Roles and permissions for the full picture.
Seafarers themselves can view their own record and their own documents through the self-service portal, but cannot edit them — changes to a crew record are made by the office.
Where crew data connects
A crew record is also the anchor point for vessel assignment: which vessel a seafarer is currently on, has been on, or is planned to join next. That relationship is covered in Fleet and manning.