At Verbeke & Daal, a customs brokerage in an office block overlooking the docks in Antwerp, the newest member of the classification team drinks no coffee and has never seen a container. It reads a 40-page commercial invoice in about nine seconds and proposes a tariff code for every line. Els Verbeke, the firm's head of classification, then checks them.
A thousand lines before lunch
The firm files about 1,600 import declarations a week, most of them for mixed consignments. A container of kitchenware can have 300 lines, from cast-iron pans to silicone spatulas, and each needs its own code. Until last year a declarant keyed them from the invoice by hand, looked up anything unfamiliar and passed anything doubtful to Verbeke.
Now software licensed from a Ghent start-up called Tarifio does the first pass. It reads the invoice, matches each description against the firm's past declarations and the tariff nomenclature, and offers a code with a confidence score. Lines scoring above 90 go to a declarant for a quick check. Lines below go to Verbeke's desk.
"We used to clear four hundred lines before lunch on a good day," said Joris Daal, the firm's managing partner. "Now it is closer to a thousand, and the good days come more often."
Where the software stumbles
The mistakes are instructive. Invoice descriptions are written by sales teams, not by customs specialists. An "accessory set" might be a set of tools or a set of earrings. A heated jacket confused the system for a week: was it clothing, or an electrical appliance with sleeves? A pallet of ceramic knives turned out to have zirconia blades, which the software classified correctly and a tired declarant might not have.
Verbeke keeps a notebook of the errors. In the first six months she logged 212 lines where the suggested code was wrong at the subheading level, out of roughly 190,000. Most were in machinery and plastics, where the same object can sit under different headings depending on what it is used for.
It is fast and it is confident, and those are the two things I trust least in a new colleague.
Verbeke said that with a smile, and then opened the notebook again.
Who signs the declaration
The legal position has not moved. Whoever lodges a customs declaration answers for what it says, and software cannot lodge one. If a code is wrong, the importer, and in many arrangements the broker, owes the duty and possibly a penalty.
Tarifio's contract caps its own liability at the licence fee. Daal read that clause twice. "If a code is wrong and the importer owes three years of back duty, the software company refunds us one month's subscription," he said. "So the software suggests, and people decide."
The firm now logs which lines were accepted as suggested and which were changed, so that in an audit it can show a person looked at each one. Verbeke says the log has already helped twice, when customs queried a classification and the firm could show the reasoning behind it.
The juniors' problem
The harder question is training. Declarants used to learn by doing the dull part, looking up hundreds of ordinary codes until the structure of the nomenclature settled in their heads. With the software handling that, the two juniors hired this year see mostly the difficult lines, without the base of easy ones underneath.
Verbeke now switches the suggestions off for new staff during their first three months. "They complain," she said. "Then one day they catch a mistake the machine made, and they stop complaining."
What comes next
Tarifio is testing a feature that reads product photographs as well as text. Daal wants to see what it makes of a picture of the heated jacket before he pays for it. Other brokers in the port are watching the firm's numbers before they sign up themselves.
One part of the job has stayed manual. The origin paperwork, which decides whether goods pay duty at all, is still assembled by people from supplier declarations and cost sheets. We explain why in How a Bicycle Gets Its Nationality.
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