Trade document guides
Practical guides for exporters and documentation staff: letter of credit discrepancies and soft clauses, cross-document consistency, and who bears freight under FOB, CFR and CIF. Every rule stated plainly so you can check your own documents against it.
Most refused payments in export trade are not caused by a wrong calculation. They are caused by documents that do not agree — with the credit, or with each other — and under strict compliance that is enough for a bank to refuse. These guides break the high-frequency mismatches into themes, state the rule behind each one, and are written so you can check your own document set as you read.
Browse by topic
Three high-frequency scenarios, from why shipments get held to how to check systematically.
Cross-document consistency
From the concrete traps, to the systematic pre-presentation check, to running the whole set in one pass.
Letters of credit and soft clauses
The clause patterns that hand control back to the applicant, and how to spot them while you can still ask for an amendment.
Incoterms and freight allocation
Who bears freight and insurance under FOB, CFR and CIF, and how to check a freight bill without jumping to conclusions.
How this differs from other document tools
Most tools do one of two things: help you draft documents, or hand the whole set to a model and return "checked, no issues found" — with no way to ask which rule was applied. This does a third thing:
- Cross-checks the whole set: upload PI, PO, CI, PL, LC and B/L together and compare them as a field-by-document matrix, rather than reading one document at a time.
- Explainable rules, no verdicts: AI only reads the characters off the page; fixed rules make the judgement. Every finding opens to the document, the line and the rule behind it.
- Flags suspected inconsistencies only: the same input gives the same result today and tomorrow, and the final call stays with you.
All articles
5 in-depth guides, from first principles to the pre-presentation check.
- How to Avoid Letter of Credit Discrepancies: 3 Checks Before You Present
A discrepancy is any mismatch between your documents and the credit, or between the documents themselves — and it gives the issuing bank the right to refuse payment. Here are the three highest-frequency discrepancy types and how to check for them systematically before presentation.
- 3 Trade Document Mistakes That Cost Exporters Their Payment
Most refusals in export trade are not arithmetic errors — they are mismatches. Three pitfalls account for the bulk of them: documents that disagree with each other, Incoterms that contradict the paperwork, and unclear freight allocation.
- Who Pays Freight Under FOB? Responsibility Split and How to Check Your Documents
Under FOB the buyer pays main-carriage freight — but local charges at origin are routinely advanced by the seller, and that is where reconciliation goes wrong. How to check freight responsibility against your documents without jumping to conclusions.
- Upload PI, PO, CI, PL, LC and B/L Together and Cross-Check Them in One Pass
Checking documents one at a time cannot find mismatches, because a mismatch only exists between two documents. What a multi-document cross-check does: one upload of the whole set, then field-by-field comparison across every document, with missing documents flagged.
- What Are Soft Clauses in a Letter of Credit, and Why Beneficiaries Must Avoid Them
A soft clause hands control of a required document to the applicant, so the beneficiary can perform perfectly and still be unable to comply. How to recognise the common patterns at the advising stage, before you ship.
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