A shipment system of record for
freight forwarders

No to both, and it is built so that it cannot quietly start to. Filing a declaration is a licensed activity under the customs broker regulations, and issuing transport documents is the carrier’s act. The software prepares: it computes the assessable value and the duty head by head, produces the declaration with every figure traceable, and hands it to the licensed person who files it. The same applies to a bill of lading — it drafts and controls the document, and the issuance is a person’s decision recorded against their name.

Every document the engine produces is cross-footed before anything downstream runs. Charge lines have to sum to the stated total, cargo item weights to the manifest gross weight, and container tare plus cargo to the declared verified gross mass within tolerance. If the arithmetic does not hold, the job ends in a state that is not a failure — it is the software working — and it names the container and the amount it is out by. There is no bypass flag anywhere in the software, and the build fails if somebody adds one.

Because it is a rule rather than a number, and the rule changes with the mode. Air bills on a divisor of 6000 cubic centimetres to the kilogram, express courier on 5000, less-than-container ocean on weight-or-measure at one revenue ton per cubic metre, and a full container bills per box regardless of what is inside it. A single divisor constant — which is what most systems have — misprices every shipment on three of the four modes, silently, and usually in the carrier’s favour. The engine resolves the rule from the mode and records which quantity won, so a rate dispute has an answer next to the figure.

Because it legitimately does. The carrier invoices at its own tariff rate, the bank settles at a market rate, and customs assesses at the rate notified under section 14 of the Customs Act, which moves fortnightly and matches neither. All three are correct for their own purpose. A system with a single rate field has to pick one, and whichever it picks produces a declaration that disagrees with the invoice it was built from. Here every amount carries its own currency and every conversion records the rate, the source and the effective date, so the shipment holds all three without contradiction.

It proposes one, with its reasoning and the competing headings, and it cannot do more than that. A classification decides the duty rate, the licensing requirement and the trade-agreement eligibility, and a wrong one is an offence rather than a defect. So a heading the software proposed cannot reach a declaration line until a named person confirms it, and that confirmation is a field on the record rather than a checkbox in a workflow. A declaration built from an unconfirmed classification is refused by a validator.

Because free time is money and the two timestamps differ by days. A gate-out event that reaches the system four days late still started the detention clock when the box actually left the terminal. The record keeps both: when it happened, and when the message arrived. Every accrual, arrival estimate and exception is computed from the first. Systems that use the second under-report detention exposure by exactly the length of the delay, which is the period a forwarder most needs to know about.

The schema. Issuing mints the originals as individual rows, each with its own state, rather than setting a status on the document. A second issuance is refused while any original is neither surrendered nor voided, and the refusal names the outstanding ones. An amendment creates a new version that voids the prior set explicitly, and the whole chain is auditable. This is deliberately stricter than a sign-off gate on the other lines, because a bill of lading is a document of title and whoever holds an original can claim the cargo.

Yes. The console is one client of the API rather than a wrapper around a private one. Status messages arrive as EDI or as carrier tracking events and are de-duplicated, so the same message delivered twice produces one milestone. Completion callbacks are signed over the exact bytes sent, so a receiving system can verify an invoice audit arrived intact and reject a tampered one. Exports come as documents, as spreadsheets with the working intact, as structured data, and as EDI.