Run one report in your own CBP account. That is onboarding.

If your broker has already associated your importer of record number to their own ACE top-level account, you cannot create your own. ACE will not let two accounts claim the same IR number, and the ten-minute verification code goes to the point-of-contact email on your CBP Form 5106 — which, for a long-standing broker relationship, is very often the broker’s inbox rather than yours.

That is not an unusual misconfiguration. It is the ordinary state of affairs for an importer who has had the same broker for years and never had a reason to look.

Path one — your IR number is unclaimed. Ten minutes, start to finish, and the first report lands the next morning. Most importers who have changed broker recently, or who set up their own IR number, are here.

Path two — your broker holds it. Days rather than minutes, and one slightly awkward conversation: the 5106 point of contact has to be changed to an address you control, or your broker has to release the IR number. Brokers do this. They do not always do it quickly, and some will ask why.

We publish this rather than discover it in week two of a paid engagement, because finding out then costs you a delay and costs us a refund. Check it before you pay us anything — question three of the intake is exactly that check.

These are the whole of our intake. If the answers are clean, onboarding is an afternoon. If they are not, we would both rather know now.

1. What is your importer of record number?
2. Do you already have an ACE portal account?
3. Does your broker hold your IR number in their ACE account — and whose inbox is the 5106 point of contact?
4. Can you supply commercial invoices and packing lists for the same entries?

One answer disqualifies outright, and it is not on this list: if you buy DDP, or your supplier or forwarder is the importer of record, the entries are not yours and none of this works. We will say so rather than sell you something adjacent.

Entry records are kept five years under 19 CFR 163.4. Packing lists sit under 163.4(b)(2) and are only required to be retained sixty days. So the one document that maps an entry line back to a SKU is the first one to disappear — and the allocation from entry line to SKU is the entire job. No government feed contains a SKU, an ASIN or a part number.

Whatever you decide about us: email your forwarder today and ask for the packing lists covering your last twelve months. It costs you one message, and in three months some of them will be gone.

ACE reporting runs against a nightly update, and CBP’s own guidance is to schedule reports after 5:00 AM Eastern so they pick it up. An entry filed this afternoon is not in tomorrow morning’s file by magic; it appears once it has been processed and the nightly run has happened.

That is fine for the work this does — reconciliation is a backward-looking act on entries that have already been filed. It is not fine as a basis for anything described as real-time, so we do not describe it that way.

What Supercargo will compute

• Customs value on the US basis — FOB. Under 19 CFR 152.102(f) international freight and insurance sit outside it where they are separately identified. Freight still belongs in your cost per unit; it is simply not dutiable.
• Column 1 duty on the HTSUS number from your own entry summary, effective on the date of entry.
• Chapter 99 overlays as their own lines rather than a blended rate — Section 232 derivative duty on the full customs value, Section 301 list membership, and antidumping or countervailing duty scoped to your actual exporter.
• Merchandise processing fee and harbor maintenance fee where charged, including the MPF floor — which is assessed per entry, so more numerous smaller consignments cost more in fees even when the goods are identical.
• Freight, insurance and brokerage allocated down to the unit by FOB value or by weight — you choose, and the choice is recorded on every figure it touches.

What you supply

• The commercial invoice behind each entry, so lines can be matched to SKUs.
• Your freight invoice, if you want freight allocated rather than estimated.

One honest subtraction: switching a shipment from ocean to air changes your US duty by exactly nothing, because freight is outside the customs value either way. Any tool that shows a mode switch moving your US duty bill is running a rule that belongs to a different country. It does move entry count, and therefore fees.

What Supercargo will compute

• Modelled duty against duty actually assessed, line by line, for every entry summary in the report.
• Each Chapter 99 line kept visible as its own number — a 25% steel-derivative line on the full customs value looks nothing like a 2% Column 1 line once it is separated out, and buried in a total it looks like neither.
• Variance flagged by cause: classification, valuation, origin, an exclusion, or an overlay that began or ended part-way through your year.

What you supply

• Your scheduled ACE report. Then the commercial invoices and packing lists for the same entries — because no government feed contains a SKU, and the allocation from entry line to SKU is the actual work.

The reconciliation treats your filed entry as the fact and the published tariff as the claim, never the other way round. That ordering is deliberate: the official machine-readable HTS export is wrong in both directions at once. Its Additional Duties column is empty on every consumer-goods and primary-steel row we checked — so stainless kitchenware from China reads 2% where the real figure is 27% once the Section 232 derivative duty on full customs value is counted — while 73 Chapter 99 headings still print live rates of 10–41% months after Executive Order 14389 abolished them on 20 February 2026, with no termination note.

What Supercargo will compute

• Units, fees, advertising spend and net proceeds per SKU per day, from Amazon’s own economics dataset — two years of history.
• True margin, computed on the landed cost rather than on the cost you typed in once.
• The variance against the cost Amazon holds, which is what makes the whole figure checkable inside Seller Central rather than checkable only against us.

What you supply

• Nothing — this arrives with the Amazon connection.

The entry work above needs no Amazon grant at all — that is the whole reason the audit is what we open with, and why there is nothing to wait for.

What Supercargo will compute

• Units by named fulfilment centre and by region, from the inventory ledger, as at end of day.
• Sell-through by region, so "where should the next container go" is answered out of your own data.
• The receive-time model: the gap between landed, receipted and sellable, learned per fulfilment centre.

What you supply

• Nothing.

A daily batch, not a live feed. Amazon’s near-real-time inventory endpoint reports one number for the whole marketplace; the per-warehouse split exists only in a report that regenerates once a day. Anyone showing you a live per-warehouse map is showing you an estimate.

What Supercargo will compute

• Milestones from the carrier or your forwarder, normalised to one vocabulary.
• An arrival band, p50 and p90, adjusted for the carrier’s own schedule reliability. Never a single date.
• A demurrage and detention free-time countdown from the discharge event.

What you supply

• A container number or house bill of lading. Most sellers buy on a house bill through a forwarder and cannot produce one at booking — so you will also be able to forward the arrival notice to your Supercargo address and have it read out of the document.

Amazon publishes a shipment-tracking API for the United States store, but every identifier it documents is Amazon-issued and its sandbox defines no case at all for a container number or a house bill of lading, so it looks like coverage of cargo Amazon is itself moving. We have not been able to settle that, because settling it needs a production credential we do not hold yet. Until it is settled this module is designed around carrier and forwarder data instead, and we would rather say so than imply a source we cannot demonstrate.

What Supercargo will compute

• Money tied up by stage — deposit paid, on the water, at the port, in prep, at the fulfilment centre — valued at landed cost rather than at invoice cost.
• Amazon disbursements against supplier payment dates, so the working-capital gap is a number rather than a feeling.

What you supply

• Supplier payment terms and deposit schedule. Entered once per supplier.

What Supercargo will compute

• The refund rate beside the return rate, the share of returned units Amazon can resell, and what returns cost per unit sold — unsellable stock, the fulfilment fee Amazon keeps and the refund administration fee — carried into true profit.
• Every refund where the item never came back, every return graded carrier-damaged, and every unit lost or damaged in a fulfilment centre, with the date its claim window opens and closes. Amazon’s automation pays many of these; the ledger shows the ones it has not.
• The manufacturing cost Amazon reimburses lost units at, against the supplier invoice behind your own entries — since 31 March 2025 that is the figure every warehouse claim is paid on, and Amazon estimates it if you have not set it.

What you supply

• Nothing beyond the Amazon connection: returns, reimbursements, refunds and the inventory ledger come from reports the read-only authorisation already covers.

Amazon decides every claim. The ledger shows what its published rules entitle you to ask for, on the published basis and inside the published window — it never says a claim will be paid.

Zonos publishes the current tariff picture, accurately and free, and you can have it open in the next browser tab while you read this. Anyone selling you superior tariff knowledge is selling something you can disprove in thirty seconds, so we will not.

What nobody else has is your filed entry. The rate is public; the question of whether that rate was applied to your goods, on your entry, at the value you declared, with the right Chapter 99 lines and none of the dead ones, is a question about a document only you can produce. Attaching the public number to your own entry, and then down to the unit you sell on Amazon, is the work. It is unglamorous and it does not compress into a calculator.

In the United States this stopped being a design preference and became the condition of the product existing at all. Customs business is licensed under 19 U.S.C. 1641 and 19 CFR part 111, and 19 CFR 111.11(a)(1) requires the individual licensee to be a US citizen — so the person who runs Supercargo cannot hold a broker licence, ever. Licensure is not an available answer, which means the design has to stay off the line permanently rather than asking forgiveness at it.

CBP draws that line in a place worth understanding, because it is more forgiving in one direction and much less in the other:

• Backward, against an entry already filed, is expressly permitted. CBP has ruled that an unlicensed person may perform a post-entry audit of an importer’s records in order to give the client feedback on the accuracy of completed entry transactions. That is precisely what this product does.
• Forward, on a specific shipment about to be imported, naming a 10-digit HTSUS number, is customs business — and a disclaimer does not save it. CBP has held that verifying tariff numbers before entry is customs business where the corrected classification may end up on the entry; it has held a software vendor to be conducting customs business even though a licensed broker filed every entry; and it has held against a vendor whose output was labelled advisory only.

So the code always comes from one of three places, in this order:

1. Your entry summary. Declared by your own licensed broker, in your own name, to CBP. This is ground truth and nothing overrides it.
2. A code you entered on the SKU. Your choice, captured once and inherited by every future shipment of that SKU.
3. Nothing. The SKU is marked unclassified, no duty is computed, and it appears in the gaps ledger until you resolve it. It is never quietly guessed.

The output is never “your code is wrong”. It is: given the number you declared and the value you declared, on the date you declared it, here is what the published tariff says, here is what CBP actually assessed, and here is the difference. You choose the code, Supercargo computes on it, and your broker governs what is declared. What you do with the difference is between you and them.