Import and export documentation in one system

One of the queries this site gets shown for is not a keyword at all. Someone typed “looking for solution that handles both import and export documentation” into Google, in those words, and landed on our document-checking page. One impression. It is worth more than its volume, because it is a buyer describing their own desk in a sentence, and the sentence contains the requirement most vendors in this category quietly fail.

Both directions is the normal case, not the edge case

Trading desks are rarely purely one thing. The house buys and the house sells, often on the same commodity, sometimes in the same week, and the same four people handle the paperwork in both directions. The desk the figures on this site are drawn from is an import–export desk, and that is not incidental to the numbers.

Of the roughly 2.2 hours of desk work a container consumes, the single largest line is export doc-pack preparation and checking at 45 to 90 minutes — ahead of supplier follow-ups at 30 to 45, status tracking and reporting at 20 to 30, and payment tracking at 10 to 15.

Read that against how this category is sold. Almost everything marketed to an importer reads the inbound pack: the invoice, the packing list, the certificate of origin that arrives from a supplier abroad. That is real work and it is the second-largest line. The largest one, on the same desk, with the same people, is the pack going the other way.

The two directions are not mirror images

It is tempting to assume export documentation is import documentation with the arrows reversed. It is not, and the difference is the deadline.

An import deadline counts forward from the ship arriving. The bill of entry is measured against entry inwards; the US entry summary from release; free time and demurrage from discharge. Time passing makes it worse, and almost until the end, a fix is still possible.

An export declaration counts backwards from the ship leaving, and the real cut-off is earlier than the sailing. Singapore Customs’ recommended practice for sea cargo is lodgement

Before cargo lodgement with sea port operators (gate-in)

The United States says the same thing in hours: for vessel cargo, the filing citation is due to the carrier “twenty-four hours prior to loading cargo on the vessel at the U.S. port where the cargo is laden”. Either way, by the time the vessel is working, the box has been in the terminal’s hands for days and the window is shut.

That asymmetry has a practical consequence for software. On the import side a tool can be useful by surfacing a problem late, because the container is sitting there and something can still be done. On the export side there is no equivalent: after gate-in the correction has nowhere to go, and Singapore Customs lists “Submitting declarations only after export” among its common offences rather than among its inconveniences.

One record, because it is one trade

The other half of the buyer’s question is quieter. The documents on both sides of a trade are largely the same documents.

Your commercial invoice, packing list, certificate of origin and bill of lading go out with the cargo and arrive at the other end as somebody’s import pack. The values on them have to agree with your sales contract, and, where you bought the goods to sell them, with your purchase contract too. Two systems means the same consignment is typed twice, checked against two different sources of truth, and reconciled never.

This is why the contracts are the entry point rather than the documents. The purchase contract says what you are owed and by whom; the sales contract says what you owe and by when. Every check in both directions is a comparison against one of those two, and every chase is a consequence of one of them being unmet.

What to ask a vendor

Three questions separate the tools that genuinely hold both directions from the ones with an export tab.

1. Which date is the deadline hung off? If the export clock counts from vessel departure rather than from cargo lodgement at the terminal, it is late by days on every shipment and will never say so.
2. What happens when a field disagrees with the contract? Recording that a document arrived is not checking it. Naming the field, showing both values and chasing the correction is.
3. Is the record one record? If the outbound pack and the inbound pack live in separate modules with separate masters, the overlap between them is doing no work for you.

Import document checking software earns the name on the second question. The first and the third are what make it worth running on a desk that sells as well as buys.