When a consignment is held at destination customs, the first call is usually to the freight forwarder. Most of the time that call is to the wrong party. Nothing was lost in transit — a document was.
These are the five that come up most often in held files. All five are checkable before freight is booked, and each takes under a working day to verify.
1. A valid, current CPP
The CPP — Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product — is issued by the country of origin and states that the product is authorised there and made at the named site.
Two failures recur:
- Expiry. A CPP has a life, usually one to two years. A certificate that was valid when the dossier was assembled may not be valid when the goods move.
- Name and address matching. Product name, manufacturer name and manufacturing-site address on the CPP must match the destination marketing authorisation exactly. One extra word in the company name is enough for rejection.
Before every shipment, check the expiry date and the three-way name match.
2. A batch certificate of analysis for the batch in the box
The CoA — Certificate of Analysis, the quality-control test results for one specific manufacturing batch — must relate to the batch actually being shipped. Not the previous one, and not a representative sample.
The recurring error is sending the CoA for a different batch because "the specification is identical". The specification is identical; the batch number is not, and the batch number is what the inspector reads.
Check: the batch number on the CoA, on the product packaging and on the invoice must be the same number in all three places.
3. The import permit, before departure
In many markets the importer must hold an import permit before the goods arrive. That is the importer's task, but the consequences are shared.
The recurring error is timing: the permit is applied for while the goods are already moving. If issuance takes several weeks, the consignment sits in a customs warehouse — and for a cold-chain product that wait can destroy the shipment itself.
Check: before booking freight, ask the importer for the permit number in writing. Not a verbal assurance — the number.
4. Cold-chain documentation
If the product has temperature requirements, three documents travel with it and one of them is usually absent:
- the product's permitted temperature profile — what range, for how long
- the thermal packaging validation report for that lane and that season
- the data logger record for that specific consignment
The third is the one that goes missing. The logger is placed in the box but its data is not read until after clearance, and if an inspector asks for it before clearance, the consignment stops.
5. Documents that agree with each other
The fifth is not a document, it is a condition — and it is more common than any of the four above.
Commercial invoice, bill of lading, packing list, certificate of origin and CoA have to agree on five fields: shipper name and address, consignee name and address, goods description, quantity and weight, and batch number.
In practice each document is completed by a different person, and the smallest divergence — "Co." on one and "Company" on another — is enough to route the file to manual review. Manual review means days, not hours.
Check: one person, once, puts all five documents side by side and reconciles those five fields. It takes twenty minutes and has the highest return of anything in the process.
Why these five keep recurring
Not because nobody knows about them. Because nobody owns the check. Production assumes commercial is checking, commercial assumes the forwarder is checking, and the forwarder only sees what it was handed.
The fix is structural rather than a matter of care: a pre-shipment checklist with one named owner, and no consignment booked without that signature.
Next step
If you have a consignment held now, or you want these five checked before a first shipment, complete the assessment form and describe the situation in the free-text field. You get a written reply within two working days listing exactly what has to be obtained and in what order.