How a UK forwarder is moving customs compliance from a sample to every job

On every customs job, four things have to agree: the customs entry, the customer's entry instructions, the shipment documents and the CargoWise job. Values, commodity codes, origin and parties all need to line up. The forwarder runs around 1,400 in-scope UK customs jobs a month.

No compliance team can check all of those by hand, so the review was a 10% sample, and the other 90% were never checked. They were trusted until a mismatch showed up as a hold, a penalty or a client query, long after it would have been cheap to fix.

Clearance assembles an audit pack for each in-scope job, reads the documents through the same Relay layer as intake, and compares each ruled field across every source. The rules come from a compliance matrix the forwarder's own team signs off, so changing a rule means changing a sheet, not code.

It also checks that every required document is present for the entry type. Each finding comes with its evidence: which document, which field and which rule, with a severity the matrix defines. A reviewer decides in seconds instead of re-reading the file.

Clearance never lodges, amends or releases anything. It tells the compliance team what doesn't match, and what happens next stays their call. Passes are recorded with what was checked, and a failed critical rule is never marked as passed.

It's scoped as a later wave of the same programme. The compliance matrix and a set of known-good and known-bad sample packs are being gathered now, and the first results go on this page after acceptance testing.