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I'm going down a bit of an EU/Customs rabbit hole as one of the parts we manufacture at work and previously delivered to a UK automotive company is now required to go to a company in Germany which will carry out some final assembly before shipping back to the UK. (we are now selling to the German company direct, it's not a temporary export)
I thought it would be relatively simple as we're now supplying straight to Germany as a direct customer and shipping (at the moment at least) on their UPS account. There seems to be some confusion though over whether we need to submit export declarations or set anything else up, or if we can simply ship with Commercial Invoice copies (which contain a declaration statement) as we would for a 'normal' delivery going to Europe these days or if we've underestimated how much more process/paperwork is involved.
Does anyone on here do anything similar/have any experience of this?
We had to do it to ship some stuff to Ireland last year. The paperwork was massively complicated and needed some ridiculous details about how it was being shipped and even the reg of the van ( yeah, if course I know that!). We ended up using a specialist company that did all the paperwork for a fixed fee. Not sure if anyone ever looked at it but all went smoothly.
I can't directly help but can say "Germany? Oh no...."
Had to deal with their customs for some work stuff, was an absolute nightmare of shipping, getting stuck, coming back etc. One time the guy in Germany called them up to find out what had happened to the kit and it was stuck in customs and they were about to destroy it the next day, without having warned us!
Was such a nightmare we nearly just wrote it all off.
Anyway, your relationship sounds simpler so hopefully it'll go ok... I'd just advise if things are getting stuck, don't wait too long if it might be in German customs, give them a call!
The declaration statement on the invoice (The exporter of the products...etc)Â is a statement on the origin of the goods so that the German importer can claim preferential status and pay no import duties if the goods are of UK origin.
UPS should be able to create the export declaration that German customs would require for the final clearance of the goods at destination.