For the people who prepare, pay for and answer for trade documents.
DocAccord advises the trader, exporter or importer, on cost and transaction efficiency. Each role below meets the same documents at a different moment, with a different question.
ICC Academy estimates that 65-75% of documentary-credit presentations are refused on first presentation. Most refusals can be resolved, but each one costs rework, fees and a later payment. Source: ICC Academy
You re-read every line by hand, and the 21-day clock keeps running.
You assemble the set, compare invoice, bill of lading and certificates against the credit field by field, and fix whatever turns up in the last hours before the courier leaves. Under UCP 600 Art. 14(c) the documents must be presented no later than 21 days after shipment and within the credit's expiry, so every correction round eats time you do not get back.
- Upload the PDFs, confirm the extracted fields, and the check runs against UCP 600 and ISBP 821.
- Every finding shows Found and Expected, the article it rests on and a suggested fix you can use or change.
- The deadline calendar lists every date your open credits create (Business plan and up), with a daily email (Professional plan and up).
A refused presentation is a fee, lost hours and cash that arrives late.
The bank charges a discrepancy fee, your team spends hours on corrections and calls, and the invoice value stays unpaid while the documents go back and forth. On our editable cost model that comes to about €440 per refused presentation: €75 bank fee, €135 rework and €230 cost of capital on the delayed payment. At 4 shipments a month the model's default assumptions add up to €10,563 a year.
- Put your own bank fee, hours, LC value and cost of capital into the calculator and see the exposure per year.
- Every check produces a PDF audit report you can file with the transaction, on every plan.
- Named sign-off for internal control: findings that need a human decision get an explicit sign-off, recorded in the audit trail with who signed and when.
Every amendment after issuance costs a fee and can hold up the shipment.
If your supplier cannot work with the credit you opened, you pay for amendments and wait for the goods. The Pre-Issuance Review reads the credit, including a draft before your bank issues it, and flags what typically causes that: soft clauses, non-documentary conditions, an expiry that leaves no time to present, or a goods description that only points to another document.
- The Workability, Pre-Issuance and Amendment Reviews use no check credit: unlimited on every plan and with a check credit; without a plan or credit, up to 10 Letters of Credit, amendments or sales orders can be read in any 30 days.
- Reviewed as a draft, each finding is still a negotiating point rather than an amendment everyone has to consent to.
- The Amendment Review shows what an amendment changed against the original credit, on every plan.
When payment stalls, you are the one explaining the refusal.
You prepare the transport documents and often the whole set for your exporter clients. A check before the set leaves your office catches the mismatch while it is still a reprint, not a refusal. That protects your client's payment and your relationship with them.
- Bill of lading checks cover claused B/Ls, on-deck loading and transhipment prohibitions.
- Use DocAccord on your own account, or run checks for your clients in the partner programme's agency track: billing runs through you, your clients need no login of their own.
- Hand your client a finding list with the rule reference and a suggested fix, not an opinion.
A figure that differs between invoice and packing list holds the goods at the terminal.
Customs Clear cross-checks the commercial invoice against the packing list and checks the HS code on every line before the export declaration goes out. For US, UK and EU destinations the HS code is looked up in the official tariff; for other countries only format and completeness are checked. Whether the classification is correct stays with your customs office or customs broker.
- Invoice total against the sum of its lines, packing list net weight against the invoice, country of origin against your confirmation.
- Sanctions screening of the parties against the EU, US and UK lists, on every plan. A near-certain match stops until it has a named sign-off.
- Not a substitute for your own export-control screening: a match is a flag for your compliance officer to review, not a decision.
DocAccord is a pre-check with best-practice guidance, not legal advice. Whether a presentation complies is decided by the examining bank under UCP 600 Art. 14(a), and the export declaration by customs.