Exporters should prepare for UK customs system switch

Last year, importers switched to the new Customs Declaration System (CDS), a switch which led to chaos for forwarders as days of rolling system outages disrupted workflows, caused issues at the border and brought frustration in the industry.

The deadline for exporters to switch to CDS is 30 November, 2023. The deadline was initially March 2023 before it was pushed back by eight months.

Matthew Bradley, Managing Director at CNS said: “There are some issues like outages on the system that are impossible to prepare for, but there are a lot of issues traders are now aware of and various learnings from last year, which mean there are known steps that can and should be taken.

“Last year showed us that organisations that trained their staff and prepared through test environments before the deadline were far less impacted by the change in system. The broader industry should learn from this and start testing and preparing now.”

CNS has created its cloud based solution Customs Declarations Management System (CDMS) to help users file compliant declarations for CDS. CDMS aims to streamline the declaration process and recently hit the 100,000 declaration milestone.

Delays, increased costs, and stress are the likely consequences of failing to submit compliant declarations, said Bradley.

CDMS speeds up the error handling and resubmission process by narrowing required data to those relevant to the declaration type, as well as explaining error codes in natural language.

“The feedback from customers is that our CDMS solution made their life a lot easier last October and they believe that we ultimately saved them time and money. We understand increased costs and slimming margins are always a key factor and we can’t protect against all eventualities. But the reassurance of knowing you are as prepared as you can be, may put end customers at ease and may even help you sleep better at night – which is something we think is pretty important in our extremely stressful industry,” said Bradley.

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