The twenty-minute cross-check

Eight checks, not eighty-five

Lesson 1 counted 85 pairs of boxes that have to agree on this shipment. You are not going to check 85 pairs, and you do not need to. The pairs are not equally dangerous. Six of them stop a container. A few more stop a payment. The rest cause a phone call at worst.

This lesson is the short list. Eight checks, on one printed set, at one desk, in about twenty minutes. Do them in this order. The order puts the check most likely to fail first.

The rule behind all eight is not identical. Six parties write these documents, for six different purposes. They will never be identical. Demanding that they should be is how people end up amending things that did not need amending. The rule is not inconsistent: two documents may say different things about the shipment, but they may not say things that cannot both be true.

Check 1 — quantity, converted into one unit

Take every quantity in the set. Write each one out in sets, the unit the contract uses. Do the conversion on paper, in front of you.

Every row is true. But two rows state the quantity in a unit the reader cannot reconcile. To do it, he needs a fact that appears on none of the documents. That is not a clerical error, and proofreading will not find it. This check finds it, and nothing else does. Lesson 4 is what it costs when nobody runs it.

Check 2 — cartons, and the split by container

1,500 on the packing list. 1,500 on the bill of lading. 1,500 on the certificate of origin. 1,500 on the export declaration. Then the split: 750 in TSLU 4471820, 750 in TSLU 4471836, and the two adding back to 1,500.

A shipment in two containers has two sets of numbers. Both must be right, and they must also sum correctly. That is one reason a second container roughly doubles the document error rate rather than adding a line.

Check 3 — the weights, and the tare test

Net 11,160.00 kg, gross 12,510.00 kg. Net must be the smaller one. Then do the test that actually catches things: subtract, and divide by the carton count.

The difference is 1,350.00 kg over 1,500 cartons, which is 0.90 kg of packaging a carton. That is a believable carton. Now try the two commonest typing errors. A gross weight fat-fingered as 12,150.00 kg gives 0.66 kg of packaging a carton — light for a double-walled export carton with a polybag in it. A gross typed as 21,510.00 kg gives 6.90 kg a carton, which is nearly the weight of the garments.

The tare test takes fifteen seconds. It turns a weight nobody can sanity-check into one anybody can.

Check 4 — the value, from the line to the credit

Multiply back. 18,000 sets at USD 11.40 is USD 205,200.00. Add the ocean freight of USD 3,560.00, which the CFR term obliges Zohara to carry. The invoice total is USD 208,760.00, and that is the amount of the credit. Three multiplications and one addition.

Then check the delivery term. It must be written the same way in every place it appears, and the freight notation on the bill of lading must agree with it. A CFR sale means the seller has paid the ocean freight. So a bill of lading marked freight collect contradicts the invoice, even though both documents are correct on their own.

Check 5 — the description of the goods

Three legitimate descriptions of the same garments, from this set:

• The credit: WOMEN'S WOVEN VISCOSE TWO-PIECE SETS, STYLE CD-517
• The invoice: the same words, because the invoice is the document that must correspond to the credit
• The bill of lading: LADIES' WOVEN GARMENTS

That is fine. A transport document may carry a general description, as long as it does not conflict. What is not fine is a description that adds a fact the others contradict — a bill of lading reading LADIES' KNITTED GARMENTS on a woven shipment, or a certificate of origin that names a fibre the invoice does not.

Check 6 — the names, character by character

Consignee and notify party, spelled exactly as the credit spells them, legal suffix included. This is the dullest check in the list, and it produces more bank discrepancies than any other. Every party in the chain retypes the name, and each one abbreviates differently.

Check 7 — the dates, in sequence

An inspection certificate dated after the on-board date is the one that stops everything. It says the goods were inspected after they sailed.

Check 8 — containers and seals

Container and seal numbers on the packing list, on the bill of lading and on the export declaration, character for character. Lesson 2 showed what that number is worth when something goes missing. It is the cheapest fact in the set, and the one most often absent from one of the three.

Act as a documentary credit checker and a customs broker at the same time, and be pedantic. I will paste the key fields of every document in one export shipment's set. Find every inconsistency, and rank them by what each one will cost me. Paste follows. Contract or credit wording [PASTE THE DESCRIPTION, QUANTITY, AMOUNT, LATEST SHIPMENT DATE, EXPIRY, PRESENTATION PERIOD AND ANY DOCUMENT REQUIREMENTS]. Commercial invoice [DESCRIPTION, QUANTITY AND UNIT, UNIT PRICE, TOTAL, TERM, CONSIGNEE, DATE]. Packing list [CARTONS, QUANTITY AND UNIT, NET AND GROSS WEIGHT, VOLUME, MARKS, CONTAINERS AND SEALS]. Bill of lading [SHIPPER, CONSIGNEE, NOTIFY, DESCRIPTION, PACKAGES, WEIGHT, MARKS, CONTAINERS AND SEALS, FREIGHT NOTATION, ON-BOARD DATE, NUMBER OF ORIGINALS]. Certificate of origin [CONSIGNEE, DESCRIPTION, QUANTITY AND UNIT, MARKS, ORIGIN, DATE, ISSUING BODY]. Inspection certificate [SUBJECT, QUANTITY, DATE, PLACE]. Export declaration [QUANTITY AND UNIT, VALUE, WEIGHTS]. Do the following. First, convert every quantity in the set into ONE unit and show the conversion, naming any fact you had to supply from outside the documents to do it. Second, test the weights: net against gross, and the implied packaging weight per carton, and say whether that per-carton figure is believable. Third, multiply the invoice back from unit price to total and to the contract amount. Fourth, compare the descriptions and tell me which differences are acceptable as a general description and which conflict. Fifth, compare every name character by character. Sixth, put the dates in sequence and flag any that fall in an impossible order. Seventh, compare container and seal numbers across every document that should carry them, and say which document is missing them. Then give me one ranked list: what stops a container, what stops a payment, and what merely produces a phone call. Do not tell me the set looks fine unless you have run all seven.