Foreign Trade

The Foreign Trade module is for the business that buys abroad. An import is not bought the way you buy from a supplier down the road. Your bank has to domicile the purchase before anything is paid or shipped. Then the goods travel for weeks, wait for customs to clear them, and the shipping line starts charging for its containers the day your free days run out. Each step has a date and a paper, and a missed date costs money.

Beelocity keeps all of it in one place, beside the purchase orders, the receipts and the stock you already follow. It is built for the import clerk or the owner who opens the files and follows the shipments, the accountant who works out what the goods really cost, and the treasurer who pays through the bank.

What you can do today

• Say once whether your business imports for resale or for its own needs, and every dossier takes it. See Setting up foreign trade.
• Keep each import programme the ministry granted its visa to, newest first: its half-year, its last day, its maximum amount and the tariff sub-headings it allows, with the dossiers filed under it. The home lists the programmes still in force. See Import programmes.
• Open an import dossier for each purchase from abroad: the foreign supplier, the currency, the Incoterm, how the goods travel and between which two places, and the country of origin. See Import dossiers.
• Keep the bank domiciliation on the dossier: the number your bank gives, its date and the bank, or the reason the purchase needs none. See The bank domiciliation.
• Gather the purchase orders of the dossier, see their value before tax, and find their goods receipts on the dossier. See Add the purchase orders.
• Follow the goods from departure to closing: shipped, arrived, customs cleared and closed, each on the day it happened. See Follow the goods.
• List the containers and see which are late going back to the shipping line. See Containers.
• Record the customs declaration the broker filed, article by article, with the goods each covers, and let it put the duties on the dossier’s costs. See Customs declarations.
• See the import taxes you deduct, month by month, and export them for your returns. See What you deduct.
• Record what the import cost beyond the supplier’s price: the freight, insurance, forwarder, port, customs and bank invoices, each in its own currency and converted to dinars. See Landed cost.

The Foreign Trade page

Open Foreign Trade in the sidebar, and its first page lists what is moving, read afresh each time you open it:

• Purpose of import not set: shown only until you have said whether your business imports for resale or for its own needs. Until then, New on the import dossiers or the import programmes brings you to Setup. See Setting up foreign trade.
• In transit: the dossiers whose goods have left, the one expected soonest first. One whose expected arrival has passed is marked overdue: that is the forwarder to call.
• Awaiting clearance: the goods that have arrived and wait for customs, with the days they have waited.
• Containers to return: the containers still out whose free time ends in the next three days or has already ended. See Containers.
• Not yet shipped: the open dossiers, by expected departure.
• Landed costs to finalize: the dossiers cleared through customs whose landed cost is still a draft, the oldest first. Until it is final, goods are priced without knowing what they really cost. See Finalize the sheet. Only someone who may see what an import cost sees this list.

Each row opens its dossier or container, where the next step is recorded. New import dossier starts a new one.

What the module is for

Foreign Trade grows with the road an import takes. It is where you will:

• follow each shipment from order to warehouse: shipped, arrived, cleared through customs and closed, with the containers that must go back before the shipping line charges for them;
• know what the goods really cost once the freight, the insurance, the forwarder, the port, the customs duties and the bank have been added to the supplier’s price;
• record what customs liquidated, and which part of it is a cost and which part is TVA you recover;
• pay the supplier through the bank that domiciled the purchase, and each charge to whoever billed it.

Who can use it

The Foreign trade officer role lets one person handle the imports without also handing them the till or the payroll. It reads the suppliers, the purchase orders and their receipts, the bank accounts and the exchange rates a dossier needs, and changes nothing outside Foreign Trade. The organization owner can do everything, as in every module. See Roles and permissions.