The client portal now accepts multiple files in a single upload, keeps a per-shipment document history, and tells you which documents are still outstanding for a booking rather than leaving you to work it out from an email thread. The change went live at the start of the month and applies to every account without any action needed.

Uploads are matched to a booking by reference, so the important habit is still to quote the booking reference on the file or in the upload form.

Both gateway terminals have revised weekday gate hours with effect from the end of this month. The early window opens thirty minutes later and the evening window closes an hour earlier, with the Saturday opening unchanged. Weekday capacity is therefore reduced by roughly ninety minutes.

Hauliers are already reporting that the mid-morning slot is the first to fill, and we expect the practical effect to be longer lead times on delivery bookings rather than a visible change at the gate.

The periodic revision of the harmonised nomenclature takes effect this year, and as usual a proportion of the changes are consequential rather than cosmetic. Codes are being split, merged and renumbered, and a code that has been correct for a decade may simply cease to exist.

Importers with a long product master and no review process are the ones most exposed, because the failure surfaces as a rejected declaration on a consignment that is already at the port.

Export documentation gets less attention than import documentation because the immediate financial consequence is smaller. The eventual consequence is not: an export that cannot be evidenced properly puts zero-rating at risk, and an incomplete audit trail on a controlled item is a compliance problem rather than an accounting one.

This is our annual reminder of what a complete export file contains.

Temperature-controlled containers are usually discussed in the context of keeping cargo cold. On northern winter routings the more common failure is the opposite: cargo that must not freeze, sitting in an unpowered box on a quay in temperatures well below the set point, with the unit switched off between plug-out and plug-in.

Chilled pharmaceutical and beverage consignments are the ones most often affected, and the damage is frequently invisible until the consignee tests the product.

Our half-year review is now with clients on a retainer. The headline is that volumes are up modestly on the same period last year, that schedule reliability on our main lanes has improved slightly, and that the proportion of declarations amended after submission has fallen for the third consecutive period.

The last of those is the number we care most about, because an amended declaration usually means something was wrong at source.