Shipping document cross-check

Purpose

Find document inconsistencies before they create customs, carrier, customer, or payment exceptions.

Scope

Commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, air waybills, purchase orders, and documentary instructions. Excluded: customs classification decisions, filing, and carrier communication.

Data basis

• Shipment documents, order or letter-of-credit terms, item master, and the company document-field mapping.
• The fixed records, tables, or folders in the skill scope that hold the relevant history or schema.

Result

A field-level reconciliation matrix, discrepancy report, and correction instruction for each affected document.

Quality criteria

• Core fields are compared across every document where they appear.
• Each discrepancy names the documents, fields, values, and citation.
• Quantity, weight, value, currency, parties, marks, and dates reconcile or are explained.
• Severity is tied to the company rule or clearly marked as a default.
• A clean shipment is reported explicitly rather than left blank.

Instructions

Normalize units only while retaining source values. Compare line items by a stable product or package identifier, then investigate unmatched lines. Distinguish harmless formatting differences from discrepancies that alter quantity, value, ownership, route, or payment terms. Never overwrite a source value; propose the correction and identify which document should be authoritative.

Adapt before use

Keep the source trail close to every conclusion and preserve the difference between a source fact, a calculated value, an assumption, and a recommendation. Use stable identifiers across the document and sheet so a reviewer can move from a summary statement to the underlying row and source. Prefer a complete, transparent partial result over a confident answer built on missing evidence.

• Add the company's canonical field mapping and severity rules.
• Define authoritative sources for each shipment field.
• Set unit and currency normalization conventions.
• Add country or customer-specific document requirements as reference documents.