Last week, Ludovic Demeyere, director of strategic customer engagements at Customs4trade (C4T), shared insights on the misconceptions, pitfalls and solutions surrounding the migration from the old Customs Handling of Import and Export Freight (CHIEF) system to the new Customs Declaration Service (CDS).
This week, he shares his experience assisting customers with the migration and discusses the support available to manage the increased validation checks under the new system.
Migration
Speaking about his experience helping customers migrate from CDS to CHIEF, Demeyere notes that it was possible to migrate “all UK customers in three weeks”.
“As soon as we were able to go live, we launched operations for them,” he says. Initially, the migration process for imports was challenging, but over time, things improved. He now feels positive about the experience of migrating UK firms:
“If you look at it from the UK, everybody is still complaining about the migration from CHIEF to CDS. But as a software company covering seven countries, we found that the UK was one of the better examples.”
Progress
The UK government has learned a lot from the migration for imports. “They have very well-documented cases, and the software and developer tools are mostly up to date,” Demeyere says.
When it came to migrating for exports, the only problem C4T and Demeyere faced was around aggregation. He explains:
“For example, if a customer is shipping goods from their warehouse, they can aggregate the items based on their commodity code.
“This means that if they’re sending out 1,000 items, with 1,000 lines in the declaration – but it's all from three commodity codes – then, in theory, you can aggregate it all in one declaration with three lines.
“HMRC has been advocating for this approach and promoting it as one of the new features of CDS.”
Although the first couple of months were not perfect, there were also issues with calculating VAT and other aspects of the functionality. However, these teething issues were resolved after the first few months by HMRC.
“From a migration perspective,” he states, the process went “pretty smoothly”. However, he points out that with the CHIEF system, “we could handle declarations with up to 999 lines”. By contrast, the current version of CDS can “only process 99 lines”.
“This means that for customers managing high-volume shipments, the declaration volume has increased significantly.”
Aside from this and the issue of aggregation, “there’s not a lot to complain about”, he adds.
“We always had direct contact with HMRC, where we could ask questions and receive responses from them. There’s nothing to complain about with their service at all.”
New checks
Compared with CHIEF, Demeyere notes, there are “significantly more validation checks” and new documentation requirements.
Some waivers have also been eliminated, which means that the information submitted to the system must be more accurate. For instance, new document requirements have been introduced for vegetable importers; they now need to provide a new document type indicating whether the origin is biological or non-biological.
“With the migration to CDS, HMRC has more time to conduct audits. Compared to two or three years ago, they are performing many more.”
Support
Demeyere explains that C4T’s software provides support for traders who are managing these new compliance checks.
“Our customs automation software, CAS, implements validation checks before submitting to HMRC.”
Additionally, Demeyere mentions that CAS can “enrich data through various configurations”. This means that even if customers lack certain information in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, they can enhance it with the data provided by us.
To learn more about how C4T can help automate your customs operations, visit our website or meet with us at the upcoming Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade’s Import Export Show on 3 December.