Commercial invoice: the document customs reads, not the one you bill from

A commercial invoice is the document that travels with an international shipment and tells customs what is in the box, who owns it, where it came from and what it is worth. Duty and tax are assessed from it. It is not the same thing as the sales invoice you send your customer for payment, even when the two carry the same numbers.

Confusing the two is the most common cause of goods sitting in a bonded warehouse. A sales invoice is written for a buyer who already knows what they ordered. A commercial invoice is written for an official who knows nothing about the transaction and has to classify, value and release it without asking you.

What a commercial invoice must show

• Exporter and importer: full legal names, addresses, and tax or EORI numbers where required.
• Invoice number and date, and the related purchase order or contract reference.
• A plain description of each item — what it is and what it is made of, not the internal SKU name.
• Quantity, unit value and total value per line, with the currency stated explicitly.
• Harmonised System (HS) code for each line.
• Country of origin, which is where the goods were made — not where they shipped from.
• Incoterm and named place, so the authority knows who bears freight and duty.
• Reason for export: sale, sample, repair, replacement, gift.
• Total value, freight and insurance shown separately.
• Signature and declaration that the details are true.

Two fields cause most delays. Descriptions written for internal use — "Assembly kit rev 4" — mean nothing to an officer who must assign a tariff line. And country of origin is repeatedly filled in with the warehouse location, which is a declaration error even when the value is right.

Commercial invoice, proforma invoice and packing list

A proforma invoice is issued before the sale is final: it quotes what the shipment will contain and is often used to open a letter of credit or apply for an import permit. A commercial invoice is issued once the goods are actually being shipped. A packing list describes how the consignment is physically made up — cartons, weights, dimensions — and carries no values at all.

Customs may ask for all three. They must agree with one another and with the bill of lading, line for line. A single mismatched quantity between the invoice and the transport document is enough to hold the consignment.

Undervaluing goods on a commercial invoice to reduce duty is a customs offence, not an accounting choice — and the gift or sample declaration is checked precisely because it is the field people misuse. Declare the real transaction value.

Getting it right at issue

1. Build the invoice from the shipment, not from the sales order — what actually left the warehouse.
2. Use descriptions a stranger can classify, and keep the HS code with the product record so it is not looked up afresh each time.
3. State the currency and the incoterm; never leave either implied.
4. Reconcile quantities against the packing list and the transport document before the shipment moves.
5. Sign and date the declaration, and keep the signed version — not the draft — with the shipment file.

Because the same shipment produces a customer invoice and a customs invoice from the same underlying lines, keeping the two in one system removes an entire class of mismatch. Ettex Invoices holds the shipment lines once and issues both documents from them, with the invoice number, currency and totals guaranteed to agree — and the sent version archived rather than regenerated. Where invoice processing already runs through the same records, the customs pack stops being a separate re-keying exercise.

Keeping the records

Customs authorities generally require export and import documentation to be retained for several years and to be producible on request. That means the signed commercial invoice, the packing list, the transport document and any origin evidence such as a certificate of origin, filed together per shipment rather than scattered across mailboxes.

The same document feeds two different filings. On the way out it supports the export declaration; on the way in, at the other end, it is what an import declaration values the goods from. Discrepancies between the two are compared more often than exporters expect, which is the practical argument for one description written once.

It also feeds the entry at the other end. An import declaration values the goods from this document, and where the shipment is being returned or rejected, the entry reference is what makes a duty repayment claim possible at all.

Two documents travel with it in different directions. An import declaration values the goods from this invoice at the receiving end, and a proforma invoice is what goes out before the sale is firm — not a demand for payment, and regularly mistaken for one.