Twelve rules, written as refusals

A figure reaches a rendered document from a charge line, a declaration line or a computation the engine performed — or it does not appear. A number a drafting model wrote into a cargo description or a claim letter blocks the render. This is enforced by a validator, and structurally as well: the build fails if the computation layer can even import the model client.

The render is blocked and the job names the figure that had no charge line behind it.

It proposes a tariff classification with its reasoning and the competing candidates. A heading it proposed cannot reach a declaration line until a named person confirms it, and the confirmation carries who and when. A declaration built from an unconfirmed classification is refused.

The declaration is refused until a named person confirms the heading.

Charge lines sum to the stated total, cargo weights to the manifest gross, tare plus cargo to the declared verified mass, duty heads to the declared total, revenue less cost to the stated margin. A document that fails any of those is refused naming the container and the amount. There is no bypass flag, and the build fails if somebody adds one.

The job ends naming the container and the amount it is out by. Nothing renders.

Air on a divisor of 6000, courier on 5000, less-than-container ocean on weight-or-measure, a full container per box. The engine resolves the rule rather than applying a configured constant, and records which quantity won so a rate dispute has an answer beside the figure.

A mode with no rule defined raises rather than falling back to gross weight.

Rate contracts, surcharge formulas, free-time rules and duty rates are effective-dated rows from reviewed, checksummed sources. Every charge records the contract that produced it. A lane with no contract in force on the day is refused, never rated from an expired sheet.

A lane with no contract in force on the day is refused, not rated from the last one.

There are no bare amounts. A conversion takes an explicit rate naming its source and effective date, and those travel onto the row produced. One shipment can carry the carrier’s rate, the bank’s and the rate notified for customs without any being wrong. A date with no rate on file is refused rather than approximated.

A conversion with no rate source raises, and a date with no rate on file is refused.

No floating-point number touches a charge, a weight or a duty figure — in the database, in the engine or in the browser. The arithmetic layer raises on a float rather than coercing it, because by then the precision is already gone and the fix belongs upstream.

The arithmetic layer raises on a float rather than coercing it, and the build fails on a floating-point money column.

Parsed plus rejected plus duplicate has to equal the rows submitted. An unrecognised format is an error, not an empty result, and every rejected row is kept exactly as the file wrote it with its reason — on a screen, not in a log.

An unrecognised format is an error naming what it could not identify, never an empty result.

Free time, arrival estimates and exceptions compute from when a thing happened, not from when the message about it arrived. Both are kept. The two differ by days, and the difference is billable.

Accrual and exception logic read the event timestamp; a late message does not move the clock.

Issuing a bill of lading mints its originals as rows with their own state. A second issuance is refused while any is neither surrendered nor voided, and an amendment voids the prior set explicitly. The chain is auditable end to end. Until issued, every export is watermarked a draft.

A second issuance is refused naming the originals still outstanding.

Consignee, notify party, vessel and port are screened at booking against the published lists, with the list version recorded. A match stops the booking. The override requires an operations manager and a written reason, both audited.

The booking stops. An override needs an operations manager and a written reason, both audited.

Scoping is applied where the query is built rather than at each endpoint, so it has one place it can be forgotten rather than one per route. A read, list, search or download across organisations answers as though the record does not exist — because a refusal would confirm it does, and a real shipment reference is a fact about another forwarder’s customer.

A cross-organisation read answers 404, and a build in which a query can be made without a scope fails.