A customs brokerage where finishing a file meant chasing the client for the one missing paper
Built an intake and follow-up tool that pulls scattered clearance documents into one structured file per shipment, flags what is still missing, and drafts the client reminder automatically, all sitting on one platform that holds every client and every file as a single source of truth.
In a small brokerage one person owns a clearance file from start to finish. The work that actually held things up was never the customs knowledge. It was getting the client to send the last missing document. Paperwork arrived scattered: some by email, some uploaded to the broker's software, some on paper, and the broker re-keyed it by hand from one tool into the next.
During peak season the chasing got worse. The same person who built the file also had to notice it was incomplete, remember who still owed what, and write the reminder, again and again, on top of the files already moving. Nothing told them at a glance which files were stuck waiting on a client and which were ready to finish.
We kept the tools the team already relied on and built around them rather than replacing anything. The foundation was one platform as the single source of truth: every client and every file in one place, a structured intake so each document lands in the right slot once, and a board showing the status of every file at a glance, including exactly which ones are stuck waiting on a missing paper.
On top of it sits the follow-up tool. As documents come in from email, the brokerage software, or a scan, they get sorted into the file automatically, and the tool flags what is still outstanding and drafts the reminder to the client in the broker's own voice. The extraction is AI-driven with a deterministic fallback behind it, so a messy scan still produces a usable, checkable record instead of failing.
The broker no longer hunts across email, software, and paper to assemble a file, and no longer keeps the chase list in their head. Each file shows what it is waiting on, and the reminder is one click instead of a written-from-scratch message. That trimmed roughly fifteen minutes of handling and re-keying off every file.
Across a peak season of hundreds of files, those minutes are days the same small team got back without adding a person. The work left for a person is the judgment, confirming the documents are right, not collecting and retyping them.
“The customs part was never the problem. The problem was tracking down the one document a client still hadn't sent, across email and paper, while ten other files were moving.”
Have a mess like this?
Tell us where time and money are leaking. We’ll map the fastest high-ROI win, usually a Pilot that pays for itself.