Customs Clearance (incl. ATA Carnets)

This chain trips more people up than anything else. To board a ferry or a shuttle you need a Port Pass, which is issued against a GMR (Goods Movement Reference), which is only generated once the customs entries are complete, and the entries cannot be completed without a commercial invoice showing what the goods are and what they are worth. Miss the invoice and the whole thing stops. Without a Port Pass we will simply be turned away at the port, and there is no arguing with the person on the gate. So we ask for the commercial invoice early, and we chase it, because it is the single document that decides whether the vehicle sails.

If your goods are not being pre-cleared, they move on a T1 transit document, and the process is more manual than most people expect. We collect the T1 from the customs office at the point of departure in the UK, drive to the customs office at the destination and present the goods for clearance there, and that appointment can take anything from an hour to the whole day depending on how busy the office is and how the paperwork reads. European customs offices generally close at 4pm most days and are shut all weekend. Build that into the delivery date. Where a client has a business entity in France, we can pre-clear there under one of the EU VAT regimes and run straight through to anywhere in the EU.

Not everybody has an entity in the country they are shipping to, and that is where a lot of projects stall. Subject to the country, our customs agent may be able to act as your exporter of record or importer of record, and we will say up front what that costs, because it is typically anywhere between 10 and 15 percent of the value of the goods and nobody enjoys finding that out late. We hold a Standard International Goods Vehicle Operators Licence with four UK Licences for the Community, which since 21 May 2022 has been a legal requirement for anything over 2.5 tonnes carrying goods for hire or reward in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. That licence is not optional.