Who and what the system tracks — the organisations that apply for, hold, own, operate, charter or receive under a licence, the people who act for them, the vessels and their registrations, and the ports and commodities that voyages move between

Is a licence needed at all — the coastal-trade assessment that decides whether a movement is regulated interstate coastal trading, the section 12 intrastate declarations, and the exemptions that take a vessel or activity outside the scheme

What is being applied for — the licence application (general, temporary or emergency), the vessels nominated on it, the proposed voyage matters (route, cargo, quantity and window), and the supporting documents and validations

The public phase — the application is published, interested parties respond with notices of a competing Australian service, third parties comment, and the applicant answers each in turn

The authorisation granted — information requests during assessment, the delegate's decision, the licence itself, the vessels it covers and the conditions attached to it

The matters a licence actually permits to be run — each authorised voyage with its route, commodity, quantity and tolerance and voyages-completed balance, plus variation applications and their decisions when those matters change

What actually happened — the voyage with its loading, departure, arrival and discharge timestamps, the port calls, the cargo and passenger movements carried, and the operational events logged along the way

The statutory record either side of the voyage — the pre-voyage notification and its amendments, the post-voyage report, and the reconciliation that compares authorised matter, notification and report to detect discrepancies before closeout

Keeping the operation inside the rules — wage compliance assessments for temporary-licence voyages, the obligation catalogue, the tasks it generates, the exceptions detected and the corrective actions that close them out

The evidence trail — regulatory correspondence in and out, the retained evidence items, the regulatory audits and their findings, and the notifications that keep people on top of what is due