Clearance delays almost never start at the port. They start six weeks earlier, in a line on an invoice that says assorted goods.
When a consignment sits, the importer rings us about the port. The port is almost never where it went wrong.
In the last two years, the great majority of the consignments we have seen held up were held up for one of three reasons, and all three were visible on the paperwork before the ship sailed.
The first is a description nobody can classify. An invoice line that reads assorted goods, or general items, or worse still the supplier's internal part number and nothing else, cannot be put under a tariff heading. Somebody then has to open the cargo and look, and that is a queue rather than a task. Ask your supplier to describe each line the way you would describe it to a customer: what it is, what it is made of, what it is for. Three extra words per line, and it removes the commonest delay there is.
The second is a value that does not sit right. Customs compares your declared value with what similar goods usually cost, and where yours is much lower it asks why. Sometimes the answer is excellent: a volume price, a discontinued line, a supplier clearing stock. That answer is worth nothing unless you can show it, so keep the price list, the correspondence and the bank transfer. We have had a query answered in four days on those three documents and we have watched importers pay thousands because the discount was real and unprovable.
The third is a permit. Food, medicine, chemicals, refrigerant gas, radios, vehicle parts and a good many ordinary tools need a permission of some sort, and the permission takes days that do not overlap with the shipping. Nothing is more frustrating than cargo cleared on paper and sitting in a yard waiting for a document that could have been obtained while the ship was at sea.
There is a fourth thing, which is not a delay so much as a cost: packing that does not describe itself. If a container arrives with forty identical unmarked cartons and the packing list gives only a total, any inspection becomes a full one. Number the cartons and put the numbers on the list.
What we ask of every customer is small. Send us the commercial invoice and the packing list when you place the order, not when the vessel is announced. We read them in an hour, tell you which lines will be queried, what the duty looks like and what needs a permit, and you have six weeks to fix all of it while nothing is costing you storage.
That hour is the difference between a consignment that clears in three days and one that clears in twelve.
