Save costs with collective customs clearance

If several consignments are brought into a country by a shipping service provider, he has the option of bundling all consignments in a collective customs clearance. This saves administrative effort and costs, which are passed on to the respective consignors. We explain how collective customs clearance works.

What is collective customs clearance?

Collective customs clearance can be used wherever consignments cross export borders and customs are involved. Several consignments and goods sent to the same destination country are shown on a single commercial invoice and declared and cleared at customs in just one administrative step. In the case of collective customs clearance, "various" or a central "Importer of Records", for example, is specified under consignee in the context of import customs clearance and a list with all address data of the respective consignees is enclosed physically or electronically with the consignment. 
After customs clearance, the transport service provider divides the groupage consignment into individual consignments again and feeds them into the normal transport flow in the receiving country. From there, the many consignments follow their normal route again and are delivered to the various recipients.
By collecting the consignments, one might think that the transit time is affected. However, this is not the case, as depending on the transport service provider, express services are even available for collective customs clearance. However, the extent to which there is still a transit time guarantee depends on the individual transport service provider.

What are the advantages of collective customs clearance?

The advantage is the avoidance of individual customs declarations for each individual delivery. What does that mean in concrete terms? Due to the considerable reduction in administrative work, large sums of money can be saved in clearance fees for the transport service providers. Since these customs clearance costs are usually charged to the consignor for each individual shipment, collective customs clearance has a strong reducing effect on the shipping costs incurred, depending on the volume of shipments, and thus leads to a more profitable logistics result. Due to the immediate effect, this is also not a process that is only noticeable after several months or years, but has an immediate effect as soon as it is implemented. In addition, depending on the transport service provider, the volume of consignments and the country, other receiving countries can gradually be integrated into the process in order to further reduce costs.

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