Frequently asked questions

How do I ensure compliance with changing regulations?

Senda gives you a source-backed operational record — duty estimates and HS classifications tied to your shipments — so the numbers you file are traceable rather than guessed. Compliance alerts that watch your shipments for missing documents and aging exceptions are on our roadmap (see below); today you review compliance from the shipment and document workspace.

Coming soon Compliance alerts

What documents are required for customs clearance?

Common documents include the commercial invoice, packing list, and certificate of origin — the exact list depends on your product and destination. Senda drafts two documents from data you have already entered: a commercial invoice from an order, and a packing list from a shipment. Both are drafts — you review them and submit them yourself, and Senda does not file with any customs authority. Senda does not generate a certificate of origin, a bill of lading, a licence, or any other form; for those, upload the documents you already have, and Senda stores, extracts structured data from, and organizes them, versioned against each shipment.

How can I avoid delays and fines?

Our duty calculation tool estimates import duty by HS code, origin, destination, and value. For the United States it uses the full USITC Harmonized Tariff Schedule — every chapter, with the General, FTA-preferential (via the Special-column program indicators) and Column 2 rates as published, pinned to the exact HTS revision. Korea and the EU use an indicative reference set — focused today on the wood, pulp, paper, and wooden-furniture chapters our customers ship most — pending full ingestion. Per-unit (specific/compound) rates, ambiguous subheadings, and unmatched routes return an honest “cannot determine” rather than a fabricated number, and every figure carries a “this is the listed rate — verify with your licensed customs broker” disclaimer (a listed HTS rate is not always the rate collected). Our HS classification tool suggests Harmonized System codes retrieved from — and validated against — that same full US Harmonized Tariff Schedule, so it only ever returns real subheadings, never an invented one. Ranking is AI-assisted, and we say so plainly: a search step first pulls a shortlist of real subheadings out of the schedule, an AI model then re-ranks that shortlist, and every code it hands back is re-checked against both the official US HTS nomenclature and the shortlist it was offered — so the model can reorder real subheadings but cannot introduce one of its own. Recall is honestly scoped: the curated keyword lexicon behind it covers five chapters completely — wood (chapter 44), pulp (47), paper and paperboard (48), iron and steel (72), and articles of iron or steel (73) — so those are the commodities it classifies best. Outside them, matching falls back to the schedule's own wording, and the tool tells you it cannot confidently classify this product rather than offering a low-confidence guess. Suggestions come with confidence levels, whether the ranking was AI-assisted or a plain dataset keyword match, and the official description as evidence. Getting these right up front reduces the misclassification and valuation errors that lead to delays and fines. Interactive training modules to educate your team on customs procedures are on our roadmap (see below).

Coming soon Interactive training modules

How do I get help with something not covered here?

Send us a message from the contact page and we'll get back to you — no account or ticket system required.