Customs documents
Table of contents
Introduction
Some shipments require customs documents, for instance if your warehouse is outside the EU and you want to ship to an EU country. If you have an integration with a shipping platform it may be possible to generate the required documents using the integration. The high-level considerations are:
- Which customs document do you need to generate? Does the shipping platform have support for them?
- Is the required data available in Ongoing WMS? The data needs to be available in Ongoing WMS for us to be able to send it to the shipping platforms.
- If the customs documents are going to be printed, which printer should be used? Are the documents labels or A4s?
- Has the integration in Ongoing WMS been setup correctly?
We will now go through these points in more detail.
Customs documents
There is a wide variety of customs documents: CN22, CN23, proformas, and so on. You need to determine which of these is appropriate for your case. Check with the warehouse client if needed.
Some transporters support fully electronic customs handling, where a customs document is generated and stored in their systems but is not printed. If this is an option which is available for you, we highly recommend it.
Once you've determined which customs documents you need, you need to check with your shipping platform supplier to see if they have support for it. The major shipping platforms, such as nShift and Logtrade, will have support for most kinds of customs documents. Your contact person at Ongoing WMS can assist you with checking this.
Required data
To generate a customs document, various pieces of information are required. Exactly what data is needed depends on the customs document.
For a "simple" document like the CN22, you will need to know the total price of the shipment and have a short description of the contents.
For more complex documents, like proformas, you may need:
- The price of each order row.
- The country of origin for each article.
- The TARIC code for each article.
Once you know which data is required, you must check that the data exists in Ongoing WMS.
To check that the required article data is available, go to Warehouse ⇒ Articles and do a spot-check on a few articles. Can you see the required article data?
To check row prices, go to the order list and open up a few orders. Go to the order lines and click on the edit icon. Then click Show all fields, and check the Order line total customs value field. Has it been filled in?
If you need assistance checking these things, get in touch with your contact person at Ongoing WMS.
Printing
If you are generating fully electronic customs documents, then you don't need to print them, and can skip this section.
Think about how you are going to print the customs documents, and how they are going to be attached to the order. Some documents such as CN22 are labels which can simply be applied to the parcel. Other documents are A4s which need to be attached using a special plastic label.
If you have the Ongoing Printer Service set up in your warehouse, it is possible to automatically print the customs documents at a printer of your choice.
Integration setup
Once you have gone through the above steps, get in touch with your contact person at Ongoing WMS and ask them to set up the integration. Due to the sheer number of options in customs documents, only Ongoing WMS can modify these settings.
When that is done, we strongly recommend that you do a test to check that the customs documents are correct.