Your invoice and packing list disagree — what customs does next

The commercial invoice and the packing list describe the same consignment from two angles. The invoice says what is being sold and for how much. The packing list says how it is physically packed, and in what quantity and weight.

They are written by different people, at different moments. The invoice comes from your office or your accounts team. The packing list comes from the warehouse, after the goods are boxed. Between those two moments things change: an order is part-shipped because one size was not ready, a carton is repacked, someone counts in pieces where the other document counts in kilograms.

Why customs reads them together#

Customs does not open every container. What it does instead is use the paperwork to decide which consignments are worth looking at, and the packing list is the document that makes that possible.

The declaration on the shipping bill states the goods and their value. The packing list says how that quantity is physically distributed. If a consignment is declared as 4,000 pieces and the packing list adds up to 3,980, the two documents describe different shipments, and an officer now has a reason to check which one is right.

A mismatch is not an offence. It is a signal that something in the paperwork does not hold together, and the response is to look more closely.

What follows#

The consignment is marked for examination instead of being cleared on the documents. The container is not loaded. It sits at the port or in the container freight station until the examination is scheduled and completed, which takes anywhere from a day to a week depending on the port. What a hold costs while it runs is the part worth knowing before it happens to you.

Your customs broker is asked to explain the difference. Most of the time the explanation is straightforward and the document gets corrected. A genuine part-shipment with an invoice that reflects what went is normal commercial practice and is not a problem in itself. The problem is when the documents were never reconciled, so nobody can say quickly which figure is the true one.

The cost is usually the delay rather than a penalty. That is worth being clear about, because fear of a penalty is what makes people slow to correct a document, and being slow is the expensive part.

That holds for a genuine clerical difference: a unit mismatch, a typo, a count that was never reconciled. It stops holding where the discrepancy turns out to be a real difference in value or quantity rather than a paperwork one — goods actually worth more than declared, or more pieces in the container than the shipping bill states. That is misdeclaration under Section 113 of the Customs Act — clause (h) covers goods in excess of the entry, clause (i) covers goods that "do not correspond in respect of value or in any material particular with the entry". It carries confiscation of the goods and a separate penalty under Section 114, on top of a reassessment of the value or quantity itself. Where the goods are not themselves prohibited, Section 125 requires the adjudicating officer to offer you the goods back against a redemption fine — that part is not a discretion — but the fine, the penalty and the delay are all still yours. The distinction customs is drawing is not how big the gap is, but whether it traces to how the documents were prepared or to what was actually shipped. Have the answer to that ready before your broker is asked for one.

The mismatches that come up most#

Quantity counted in different units. The invoice is in pieces, the packing list is in cartons, the shipping bill is in kilograms. Nothing is wrong, but the three documents cannot be read against each other without arithmetic that nobody has done. State the same unit on all three and add the others as secondary.

Net and gross weight confused. The packing list shows gross weight including packaging, the declaration shows net. If the two are swapped on one document, the figures look inconsistent.

A part-shipment reflected on one document but not the other. The warehouse knows only 90 of 100 cartons went. The invoice was raised from the order and still says 100.

Carton counts that do not add up. The packing list lists cartons individually and the total at the bottom was typed rather than summed. Easy to check, easy to miss.

Two names for the same product. The invoice uses your internal product name, the packing list uses the buyer's article code. To you they are obviously the same thing. To an officer reading them cold, they are two descriptions.

Before the goods leave#

Put the invoice next to the packing list and confirm four things: the total quantity in the same unit, the number of packages, the weight, and that the goods are described the same way on both. Then read both against the rest of the set, because a difference that exists between two documents usually exists between four.

Where they disagree, the question to answer is which one matches what went into the container. Correct the other to match, and confirm your broker is working from the corrected version rather than the copy you sent last week.