International Trade Blog

Shipping Solutions is pleased to announce the release of Shipping Solutions Professional/Enterprise 9.17 and Shipping Solutions Classic 8.17, which provides more forms and features to help our clients efficiently complete their export paperwork and comply with export regulations with each export shipment. See below for a description of each new feature.

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You may know that Shipping Solutions software is used by thousands of companies across the U.S. to create export documents, file with the Automated Export System (AES) and run compliance screenings quickly and easily. You may also know that Shipping Solutions could help your company, too! But making the final decision to purchase new software can often be fraught with questions. We’ve tried to make it easier by laying out seven things to consider before buying Shipping Solutions.

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Shipping Solutions has released an eight-and-a-half minute introductory video for its export software.

Getting Started with Shipping Solutions Export Documentation and Compliance Software shows you how to store your contacts and products in the Shipping Solutions databases, create shipments, print documents, file your electronic export information through AESDirect, comply with export regulations, and much more!

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You may have heard the news that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been replaced by the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) effective July 1, 2020.

At Shipping Solutions, we are ready to help you with the transition from NAFTA to USMCA with four new USMCA Certificates of Origin in Shipping Solutions Professional 9.16 and Classic 8.16. If you are an active Annual Maintenance Program (AMP) subscriber, you can download the update from the AMP website.

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How many ways are there to classify things? When my kids were little my mother bought them way too many Beanie Babies, but sometimes it was fun (and kind of educational) to classify them. The Beanie Babies could be organized by type of animal or by color or by what they ate or type of habitat.

You could say that governments do the same thing with goods. Sometimes goods are classified on the basis of their objective characteristics. Sometimes they are classified based on their use. Today I’m going to compare two types of classifications, the Harmonized System (HS) codes and the Export Control Classification Numbers (ECCN).

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Occasionally I’ll get a call from someone who says, “I’m almost done filling out my NAFTA Certificate of Origin. I just need to know how to complete items 7, 8 and 9. What do I put in those columns?”

Well, that’s the rub isn’t it? The rest of the form is easy, but the meat of it is in those three columns. Those columns determine whether your goods deserve preferential duty treatment under the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

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Shipping Solutions export documentation and compliance software added the ability to hide or display the Schedule B Code on the Commercial and Proforma Invoices in Version 9.15 and 8.15 of the software. If you have upgraded from a previous version of Shipping Solutions, please double-check the setting before printing your paperwork.

Most of the time, exporters will want to include the Schedule B or Harmonized System number (these codes are not the same) of their items on their Commercial and Proforma invoices. However, there are some situations where you shouldn't include HS numbers on your invoices. To accommodate all situations, an option was added to Shipping Solutions export software to allow you to display or not display the codes.

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It has only been a couple months since we released a new version of Shipping Solutions, but the release of Incoterms® 2020 Rules necessitated another update. If you are an active Annual Maintenance Program (AMP) subscriber, you can download the update from the AMP website.

Versions 9.15 and 8.15 have fewer changes than most new releases of Shipping Solutions. The major changes are to the Incoterms and the Restricted Party Screening feature. There were also a few minor fixes you might be interested in.

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Shipping Solutions now includes the ability to get a Certificate of Origin certified by a chamber of commerce right from the software.

If you are used to manually creating your certificate of origin, delivering it to a local chamber, waiting for it to be reviewed, signed and returned to you and then sending it to your customer, you can save a lot of time, and probably money, by completing your certificates of origin through Shipping Solutions.

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Shipping Solutions Professional version 9.14 includes several new features for the Data Exchange Manager (DXM) when using the text file and ODBC methods to import data from your accounting, order-entry or ERP system.

In addition, if you are already using the DXM with the text-file method, there is a simple step you need to do after upgrading to 9.14.

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