Shipping documentation software for whoever checks the pack

The pack is never in one place, in one format, at one time. The commercial invoice is a PDF from the supplier. The packing list is a photograph of a printed page, forwarded through two inboxes. The bill of lading arrives as a draft, then as a final, and the second one is not always the one that got filed. The certificate of origin comes from a chamber with its own numbering. The insurance certificate comes from a broker who copies four people.

You open all of it, type the values that matter into a spreadsheet, and compare. Then a correction comes in and you do it again. That is 45 to 90 minutes a container, the largest single line in the 2.2 hours of desk work each container consumes, and it is the line that costs the most when it slips, because a document nobody read is a document nobody can fix.

Two questions, and most desks only ask the first

Is everything there? Commercial invoice, packing list, bill of lading, certificate of origin, insurance certificate, a pre-shipment inspection certificate where the destination demands one, fumigation or phytosanitary where the cargo demands one (the agricultural import documents page lists that set in full), plus whatever the letter of credit lists. A checklist answers this and so does a printout.

Does everything agree? With each other, and with the contract that was signed. This is the harder question and the one that produces demurrage. A consignee spelled the way the exporter’s clerk remembers it. A gross weight on the packing list that is the net weight on the invoice. CIF where the contract says CFR, which is one letter and a different insurance obligation. A container number that matches the bill of lading and not the seal list.

Docket reads the documents that arrived and asks the second question on every one of them. The field that disagrees is named, with the two values side by side and the document each came from. While the box is on the water, not on the day the broker calls.

What happens after the field is named

You do not send the reminder. The chase goes to whoever owes the correction, with the shipment, the document and the field in the message. If email is ignored, WhatsApp at 24 hours, SMS at 48, an AI voice call at 72. The reissued document lands on the shipment when it comes back, is read again, and the item closes. You see every step. You are copied on nothing you did not ask for.

This is the part of the job that made it a full day. About 65% of the drafting and checking is built to run without a person, and about 85% of the chasing. What is left for you is the judgement: whether a description of goods is close enough to the contract line to file, whether to accept a certificate dated a day after the bill of lading, whether the credit’s tolerance covers a short shipment.

The clock this is all against

Free time starts at discharge, in calendar days, and does not pause because a document is pending. Packs routinely run about eight days late against it, and a week of demurrage on one container has cost about US$12,000. Docket derives the last free day from discharge and builds the checklist backwards from it, so every item has a date and the date is the one that matters. The import document checking page walks through the check in detail, and the bill of lading and packing list entries cover the two documents that break packs most often.

What the desk looks like afterwards

The container that took you 45 to 90 minutes of reading takes the minutes it needs to decide the exceptions. The fourth reminder is not yours to send. And when the broker asks where the certificate is, the answer is on the shipment’s timeline with the email it came in on, which is the audit trail nobody has to build by hand.