For importers, exporters & forwarders
The same shipment gets typed into six different documents.
The data was correct the first time. Every retype after that is a chance to make it wrong, and one wrong document is a container sitting at the port.
Why this is worse than ordinary data entry
Because in your industry a keying error doesn’t cost you an apology. It costs you storage and demurrage.
Every consignment coming into New Zealand has to be cleared by both the New Zealand Customs Service and the Ministry for Primary Industries. Anything over NZ$1,000 in customs value needs an electronic import declaration, and only registered users of the Trade Single Window can lodge one. On top of that sit client codes, declarant competency requirements and MPI biosecurity documentation.
It is a document-heavy, rules-driven, highly repeatable process — which is exactly the shape of work that should not be done by hand, and almost nobody in this country is helping small importers with it.
To be completely clear: we do not prepare or lodge your customs entries. That stays with your licensed broker or your registered declarant, where it belongs.
We automate everything aroundit — collecting the documents, entering the data once, moving it between systems, tracking the shipment, telling the customer. We won’t advise on tariff classification, duty or biosecurity requirements either. We work alongside your broker, not instead of them.
Where it goes
- One shipment's details retyped across the commercial invoice, the packing list, the entry, the insurance certificate and your inventory system
- Supplier document packs chased by email, and incomplete when they finally arrive
- Landed cost worked out in a spreadsheet weeks after the container cleared
- No proactive ETA updates, so customers ring to ask where their goods are
- Compliance documents living in one person's inbox, with no archive and no retention
Count documents, not hours
Say 30 shipments a month, six documents each, and twelve minutes per document of retyping and cross-checking. That’s 36 hours a month — a full working week — spent copying data that was already correct once.
And then the number that isn’t about hours at all: one delayed clearance. Storage, demurrage, a customer conversation you’d rather not have, and possibly a sale you can’t fulfil. Most importers can name the last time it happened and roughly what it cost.
Catching one missing certificate a week early usually pays for a good chunk of the work on its own.
The systems you’re already running
The Trade Single Window for entries, your broker’s system — often CargoWise — the shipping line and freight forwarder portals, and then Cin7 or Unleashed where the goods become stock, with Xero underneath.
The work sits in the gaps between those, and in the email threads where supplier documents actually arrive.
What we’d automate
- Supplier document packs collected and checked for completeness before the shipment sails, not after it lands
- Shipment details entered once, then populating every downstream document from the same source
- Milestone notifications to your customers — departed, arrived, cleared, delivered — without anyone sending them
- Landed cost calculated as costs come in and pushed into your inventory system with the stock
- A document archive with proper retention, instead of a mailbox and a shared drive
Where AI earns its keep here
A supplier sends a document pack — commercial invoice, packing list, certificates, bill of lading — in whatever format they happen to use. It gets read, checked against what this particular shipment actually requires, and whatever’s missing gets chased before the vessel sails rather than after it lands.
That is the whole value: a missing certificate found a week early costs an email. Found at the border, it costs storage.
And again, because it matters more here than anywhere: nothing is lodged with Customs or MPI. Ever. Documents get prepared and checked for your broker to use. The filing stays with the person who is licensed to do it.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.