Import duty margin analysis
Import duty margin analysis before a specialist review.
Import duty margin analysis helps a company understand whether tariff and duty cost is large enough, traceable enough, and clean enough to justify more expensive review.
Start with the duty-cost pool.
The first pass should separate customs duty, additional tariffs, fees, freight, brokerage, demurrage, and other landed-cost items. Finance needs to know which cost is actually duty or tariff exposure before any recovery question is worth modeling. If the company only has a broad landed-cost bucket, the first task is separation.
Connect finance to trade records.
Duty cost can appear in broker files while margin impact appears in ERP, inventory, or COGS records. The analysis should connect entry lines, invoice references, SKU or item fields, shipment data, and accounting treatment. A total annual duty number is not enough if nobody can explain which products carried the cost.
Test matching keys honestly.
Strong matching keys might include SKU, lot, serial, invoice, shipment, purchase order, sales order, or BOM relationships. Weak keys should stay marked as weak. A conservative match-rate view is better than a forced recovery model that cannot survive specialist scrutiny.
Use the result to decide the next step.
The output should tell management whether to proceed to licensed review, improve records first, or stop. This is business analysis only. Trade Recovery Data does not provide customs brokerage, legal advice, HTS classification, claim preparation, claim filing, eligibility opinions, or refund guarantees.
For the broader framing, read tariff margin trade recovery. For the source-file detail, read line-level import records before drawback.