Bill of Entry and Shipping bill data extraction by email-integration

Bill of entry and shipping bill are filed by each importer & exporter in India as per process laid down by Indian customs department. Custom House Agents who assist importer & exporters also have to process bill of entry and shipping bill files. Every importer or exporter or CHA agent has to extract data from bill of entry and shipping bill file line-item wise for doing reconciliation, preparing import register, filling duties, generating e-Way bill or for doing accounting entries. There are over 300+ data fields which are divided into 4 sections - header data, invoice data, line-item data and licensing data. Mostly this data is extracted manually by companies or their appointed CHAs. Manual extraction leads to human error and requires significant investment of time & resources by mid & large size importers & exporters. There are various different formats of bill of entry and shipping bill files which are provided by Indian customs or the relevant port authorities. This adds to the complexity of extracting the data through manual or inefficient means.

Our AWS hosted customs automation platform has an in-build OCR engine which extracts data from any format of bill of entry and shipping bill file line-item wise. It extracts all the 4 sections - header, invoice, line-item and license data on a single excel worksheet. Our solution extracts over 300+ fields which completes requirement of tax or customs team of any company operating in India. In the referred case study, our client reached out with the requirement of implementing our bill of entry & shipping bill data extraction solution for all the imports & exports they conduct. Usually in a year, they have around 8K+ shipping bills & bill of entry files. Our solution was implemented for their company-wide use and around 6 user logins were provided to them to interact with our solution. Our solution extracts data with 100% accuracy. Our solution is hosted on AWS and use avant-garde data security features which exactly met the info-sec guidelines of our client. All the data whether at rest or transit remains in an encrypted format. Our solution also enabled MFA for our client so that only authorise access to the application account is allowed.

Our Bill of entry and shipping bill data extraction solution supports multiple integration mechanisms- for ex. APIs, sFTP, EDI & email. Browser upload is a default feature provided to all clients. The referred client had lot of last year back-log of files from where they wanted to extract data and also have a high count of bill of entry and shipping bill files. They wanted to have an integration mechanism which can completely automate handling of the application. They also preferred an integration mechanism which does not require any IT investment and which can be implemented in no time.

Considering all the factors, we implemented email based mechanism for the client. Client receives bill of entry and shipping bill files either from their CHA or from the ice gate portal on their email IDs. Client setup an auto-forwarder rule of these emails to our solution account ID. These emails contain bill of entry and shipping bill file as attachments. Each email might contain multiple bill of entry or shipping bill files as attachment. Our solution auto-reads all the emails sent to us and auto-downloads all the shipping bill and bill of entry files sent as an attachment. It then, extracts the data line-item wise and prepares the detailed output report. Our solution provides the output report to the client in a merged file format so that client does not have to go through hundreds of separate files. Client decides how many shipping bill or bill of entry files they want to merge in a single excel worksheet. Output report can be downloaded from the UI of our application as well or it can also be emailed to the users on their email IDs.

Our solution has already saved over 300+ hours of effort of our client in just first two month of use. No manual effort required to operate our solution provided a lot of comfort to the client. Our solution is available for 24*7 use and provides the required data extraction to our client in almost real-time basis. Our solution is readily available for use and there is no lead time required for implementing the solution. Our customer support team is available to support any requirement on the tool and also keeps enhancing it with newer feature set. Clients can also opt for an customised output report format as per their need.