The regulated half

The work that carries legal weight rather than commercial weight

A wrong classification is an offence rather than a defect, a bill of lading is a document of title, and a shipment to a listed party is the forwarder’s exposure. These pages describe what the software refuses to do about each.

Assessable value and duty

Computed on the CIF basis under the valuation rules, at the rate notified for customs rather than the rate the bank used, with every head carrying the notification it came from.

Air freight capped at 20% of FOB where the actual exceeds it, and insurance at 1.125% where it cannot be ascertained
Basic duty, the surcharge on it, integrated tax on the duty-inclusive value, compensation cess and the infrastructure cess — each a separate head
Every head carries the notification reference that set its rate, on the line rather than in a footnote
Preferential rates applied against a certificate of origin, and drawback and remission on the export side
Duty heads have to sum to the declared total before the declaration renders
Anti-dumping and safeguard duty where they apply, each traced to the notification that imposed them
The derivation is shown rather than asserted — invoice value, freight, insurance, the rate used and where it came from

Classification

The software proposes a heading with its reasoning and the competing candidates. It cannot do more than that, and the boundary is a validator rather than a convention.

A proposal shows the reasoning and the headings it was decided against, not a single confident answer
A heading the software proposed cannot reach a declaration line until a named person confirms it
The confirmation is a field on the record carrying who confirmed it and when
A declaration built from an unconfirmed classification is refused, not flagged
A heading confirmed on one shipment does not silently carry to the next — a new consignment is a new decision
Dangerous goods carry their own grammar: UN number, class, packing group and segregation, declared or the job stops

Denied-party screening

Consignee, notify party, vessel and port of call screened at booking against the published lists. A match blocks the booking; it does not produce a report somebody reads on Friday.

Screened before the booking is accepted rather than after the cargo moves
The list and the version it was screened against are recorded on the result
A match blocks. The override needs an operations manager and a written reason, and both are audited
Re-screened when a party changes, because a switched consignee is exactly the case this exists for
Vessel screening by IMO number rather than by name, because names change and IMO numbers do not
Every screen is retained with its result, so what was known at the time is reconstructable later

Documents of title

A bill of lading is not a status field

Three originals are issued and whoever surrenders one takes the cargo. That single fact is why transport documents are modelled differently here from every other deliverable this company builds: the originals are rows with their own state rather than a column on the document.

Issuing mints them. A second issuance is refused while any original is neither surrendered nor voided, and the refusal names the outstanding ones rather than saying no. An amendment creates a new version that voids the prior set explicitly, and the whole chain — issued, surrendered, voided, re-issued — is auditable end to end.

Transport documents are also fixed forms rather than free layout. A bill of lading, an air waybill and a manifest have numbered boxes, and a carrier’s system rejects a document whose field landed in the wrong one. Field maps are versioned data beside the renderer, and a box with no mapping raises rather than rendering blank.

Where the software stops

It prepares. A licensed person files.

Filing a declaration is a licensed activity under the customs broker regulations, and issuing transport documents is the carrier’s own act. The software does neither. It computes the assessable value, works the duty head by head, produces the declaration with every figure traceable to a source, and hands it over.

That boundary is deliberate and it is not a limitation we intend to remove quietly. Software that files changes what the product legally is, what insurance it needs and who carries the liability when a declaration is wrong. If that ever changes it will be a decision announced on this page rather than a capability that appeared in a release note.

Said plainly

Reference data is a maintenance commitment, not a dataset

Duty changes with the Budget and by notification in between. Carriers issue rate increases and bunker adjustments monthly. Ports revise free time. The rate notified for customs moves fortnightly, and denied-party lists change without notice. Any product in this category is only as current as the person whose job it is to keep it current — so we would rather say that than let a page imply the software knows things it cannot know. Rate sets, duty schedules and free-time rules are effective-dated and loaded from one reviewed, checksummed source each, and a period nobody has reviewed is refused rather than computed with the previous one’s numbers. Every charge and every duty line records which set produced it, so if a set is later found wrong, the figures it produced can be found rather than guessed at. If you find something stale, telling us is the fastest route to it being fixed — and we would rather hear it from you than have you find out at an assessment.

Bring a bill of entry somebody queried

The useful test is a declaration that came back with a question. Send us the entry and the invoice behind it, and we will show you the assessable value derivation, the duty head by head, and what each figure traces to. A forwarder who clears their own customs and one who hands off to a broker want different things shown first, and the honest answer for one is often not the answer for the other.

Talk to us The standard

Get in touch

Talk to the people building it

No chatbot and no ticket queue. Tell us what your operation actually looks like — the modes you move, whether you clear your own customs, and roughly how many shipments a month — and someone who works on the software will reply.

info@legosphere.com