CN22/CN23/Commercial Invoice
From 1 January 2021, anyone in England, Scotland or Wales using a postal carrier to send parcels to the EU that have a value of up to £270 is required to complete a CN22 customs declaration form (guidance here). Businesses using a postal carrier to send items worth £270 or more are required to fill in the longer CN23 customs declaration.
Neither a CN22 nor a CN23 is required for retailers in Northern Ireland sending a parcel to the EU.
Note
Refer to https://www.ukpostbox.com/blog/cn22-cn23-customs-declarations for additional guidance, and click here for how to generate the documents.
If a business is sending a consignment via a parcel (as opposed to a postal) carrier that does not support paperless trade, then a commercial invoice is required. This is a binding customs document that contains information about the consignment contents and the agreements made (Incoterms), including who pays the customs costs.
Based on the commercial invoice, the customs authorities determine whether import duties have to be paid on the goods.
Bringing Goods into Northern Ireland
From 1 January 2021, you should make declarations when bringing goods into Northern Ireland from Great Britain or from outside the EU. These require the inclusion of a commodity code and will be generated in Delivery Manager as if they were CN22/CN23 documents.
Important
The three-month grace period (i.e. until 1 April 2021) on parcels being sent from Great Britain to Northern Ireland has been extended. For business to business movements, the temporary arrangements will now end on 1 October 2021. This means that the associated declarations for such movements are unlikely to be generated by Delivery Manager before then.
How do I generate the documentation?
After allocating your product-level consignments in Delivery Manager, you need to generate the required customs documentation and commercial invoices.
The following API calls allow you to do this:
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despatchConsignmentWithBookingCode (this also creates the consignment)
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despatchConsignment (this also creates the consignment)
You need to use the Printing Properties within each call to generate the relevant documentation.
For consignments that are being shipped across post-Brexit borders, both labels and documents elements are generated. The strings returned within the elements are Base64-encoded and need to be saved as text files. These can then be loaded into a Base64 decoder (e.g. https://www.base64decode.org/) to generate the printed output.
Note
For more information, refer to Store the Paperwork and Print Later.
Generating CN22/CN23 documents
If the consignment is going by means of a postal carrier and is under 270 GBP, an encoded CN22 is returned automatically as part of the labels element. This will either be in the form of a second label or integrated with the delivery label. The documents element will then be empty.
If the consignment is going by means of a postal carrier and has a value of 270 GBP or more, an encoded CN23 is returned automatically in the documents element.
Note
If the consignment is going by DHL, a waybill is generated.
If the carrier integration supports paperless trade, the documents element is empty.
Generating Commercial Invoices
If the consignment is going via a parcel carrier that does not support paperless trade, a commercial Invoice is automatically returned in the documents element.
If shipping to Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland, then three copies of the commercial invoice are required. Each copy will need to include: goods description, commodity code, tariff number, value and currency, packaging details, weight, origin, EORI Numbers, Incoterms, and the full address of the importer and exporter. Refer to https://www.countrywide-freight.co.uk/brexit.