Can you resend the bill of lading for last month?
The emails arrive all day. The importer's accounts team needs the invoice and the customs entry for a shipment in March for an audit. Their warehouse wants the POD for the container that arrived on Tuesday. Their buyer wants the bill of lading for a supplier dispute. Each request means an operator or an accounts clerk finding the job, finding the document, attaching it and replying.
None of this is difficult. It is just constant, and it lands on people who have more important things to do.
Why the same documents are requested over and over
Documents are produced and sent once, usually to the operator's contact at the importer. The rest of the importer's business needs them too, at different times, and the only way to get them is to ask.
- Documents are emailed to one contact and not shared internally by the customer.
- Different teams at the importer need different documents at different times.
- Documents for older shipments are needed for audits and disputes months later.
- Your staff have to search the forwarding system or shared drives to find them.
- Some documents, like PODs from hauliers, are never sent unless asked for.
What the requests cost
Every request is a few minutes of an operator's or clerk's time, and there are many of them. Customers wait for replies, sometimes a day, for a document they could have downloaded in seconds. And requests that go to the wrong person, or arrive while that person is away, get delayed further.
The document portal we build
- Documents for each shipment are gathered automatically from your forwarding system and document store as they are produced or received: bills of lading, airway bills, arrival notices, invoices, credit notes, customs entry copies you have prepared, delivery notes and PODs.
- Customers log in, and their authorised staff see only their own shipments. You control who at each customer has access, and to which document types.
- Shipments can be searched by reference, purchase order, container, date or supplier.
- Documents can be downloaded singly or as a pack per shipment.
- Customers can subscribe to document types, such as PODs or invoices, to be sent automatically to a team address when they arrive.
- Every download is logged.
| Request | Today | With the portal |
|---|---|---|
| Copy of the bill of lading | Email, search, reply | Download from the shipment |
| Invoices for audit | Clerk searches months back | Search by date, download as pack |
| POD for a delivery | Chase the haulier, then send | Appears when received |
| Who got what | Unknown | Logged |
After
Customers help themselves, at any hour, and requests to your team drop to the unusual ones. Operators and accounts clerks get time back. Audits and disputes at the customer's end are faster, which they notice. The portal can sit alongside a tracking view, so customers have one place for status and paperwork.
New staff at the customer's end benefit as much as anyone. When their buyer or accounts person changes, the new one does not have to start by asking you for everything that was sent to their predecessor. They log in and it is there.
If your forwarding system already offers a customer portal, we look at whether it can be configured to do this before building anything new.
Checklist
- Staff resend documents to customers every day.
- Customers ask for paperwork for shipments months old.
- PODs are sent only when requested.
- Documents are emailed to one person at the customer.
- You do not know which documents a customer has received.