In addition to goods transportation, many freight forwarding and courier companies offer domestic and foreign customs clearance and customs declaration as a service. You can engage a service provider of this kind to take care of all or part of an export procedure, saving you time and effort.
When commercial goods are imported, a number of conditions and procedural steps need to be observed. They are provided in this checklist. If necessary, you can engage a service provider (freight forwarding company, courier company, customs agency) for all or part of the procedure. Depending on the service provider, all steps may be performed, or only some such as declaring the goods to Customs. Or they will send the electronic assessment decisions or mail the access code, and you can download the decisions from our website.
Customs-related services offered by various freight forwarding and courier companies also include specialised services. For example, numerous service providers will also clear vehicles through customs or handle the temporary import and export of goods.
When is it advisable to engage a freight forwarding company?
Service providers that offer customs clearance as a service have regular contact with Customs. As such, they have a wealth of experience in this field and are always up to date with regard to laws, regulations and conditions. Using the expert service provided by freight forwarding companies is a particularly good idea if you only rarely have anything to do with Customs.
If you have dealings with Customs across a number of areas, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort by handing over the customs formalities to a specialist. In this way, you can avoid having to become an expert on multiple customs procedures that you may hardly ever use.
In particular, we recommend that you engage a competent customs agency to deal with more complex clearance procedures such as repairs and processing traffic, returned goods, etc. (e.g. monitoring deadlines, applying for authorisations).
How can I find a suitable freight forwarding company?
For reasons of fairness, the FOCBS cannot specify or recommend individual service providers. But there is a wide variety of firms to choose from. We recommend that you search online to find a service provider that meets your requirements. Search terms to use: customs agency, cross-border consignment, plus the location of the border crossing or inland customs office.
