Trade finance and customs, in detail
What the rules actually say, where documents go wrong, and why. Not second-hand summaries: every article cites the article it rests on, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
- Letters of credit5 min
What a letter of credit is, and why the bank only reads paper
A plain introduction to documentary credits: who is involved, why banks pay against documents, and what presentation, discrepancy and refusal mean.
Read - Practice5 min
Your first presentation: a checklist before the documents leave
The documents a credit usually asks for and the discrepancy types worth checking every time: dates, goods description, names, on board notation, amounts.
Read - Practice4 min
What one refused presentation costs: a model you fill in yourself
The four cost lines of one refused LC presentation: bank fee, rework, delayed payment, deadline risk. With the arithmetic to rerun on your own numbers.
Read - Practice5 min
Building the business case for a document pre-check
How to size refusal costs from your own bank records, work out payback against any subscription, and state plainly what a pre-check does not change.
Read - Letters of credit7 min
The 21-day rule is not a 21-day rule
UCP 600 Art. 14(c) is quoted more often than it is read. Four things it does not say, and the one clause in it that decides most late presentations.
Read - Letters of credit8 min
Five banking days: what the bank is actually doing with your documents
Document examination is not a black box and not an open-ended wait. What UCP 600 requires the bank to do, by when, and what it loses by getting it wrong.
Read - Letters of credit8 min
Need not be identical. Must not conflict.
The single sentence that decides most discrepancies, the five rules that follow from it, and why making all your documents say exactly the same thing can create a discrepancy rather than avoid one.
Read - Letters of credit7 min
About, 5 percent, and the tolerance nobody claims
UCP 600 Art. 30 contains three different tolerance rules with three different preconditions. Most exporters know one of them, and it is usually not the one that applies.
Read - Letters of credit8 min
The clause the bank ignores, and the clause that gives your buyer a veto
Non-documentary conditions and soft clauses are opposite problems with the same origin. Both are visible the day the credit arrives, and neither is a document error.
Read - Customs7 min
Three numbers a customs authority checks, and where they stop agreeing
Commodity code, customs value and origin carry most of the risk in an export declaration. Each is derived from your documents, and each fails in a way the documents themselves look fine.
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