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Etechan Butt

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Distribution and import · Canary Islands

Customs costs are split by hand in a spreadsheet only one person understands.

The container arrives, the customs declaration (DUA) arrives with its AIEM and IGIC, the Canary Islands' own taxes, and someone splits those costs across the product lines in a sheet that lives on a laptop. That sheet decides the margin on everything sold that month.

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72 ha month typing supplier invoices
½ dayper container splitting the customs costs
1person, and when they go, the method goes too
4 to 8weeks of work
What I come across

The sector with the most money on the table and the fewest offers.

Precisely because you can't be found online. Nobody sells you anything, and the manual work you have inside is the most expensive of all.

01

The supplier invoice arrives as a PDF and someone types it in

It comes in by email, gets opened, checked against the order line by line and entered into the ERP by hand. It is the best-solved case of everything I do and the one that pays for itself soonest. With fewer than a hundred and fifty invoices a month, not yet.

02

The customs cost split lives in someone's head

The rules for splitting AIEM and IGIC across product lines aren't written down anywhere: they are in the way one person works. What you are buying here isn't time, it is no longer depending on that person. Half the project is sitting down to write those rules.

03

Someone copies data from one screen to another

The ERP doesn't talk to the CRM, so the order gets entered twice and sales don't see the real stock until Monday. Connecting the two is usually cheaper than changing either of them, and much, much faster.

72 ha month at a distributor in Tenerife, typing invoices that arrived already written. Timed with a stopwatch over one week, not guessed.

Now it is six.

Ninety-six out of every hundred invoices go in on their own. The remaining four are checked by a person, which is exactly what should happen: they are the ones with a price that doesn't match or a quantity that never arrived. The two people in admin are still there.

The 72 hours before and the 6 now come from the company's records, not from an estimate. The whole project, with the three mistakes I made along the way and how they were fixed, is told in the catalogue.

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Before and after

The case, measured.

n8n workflowEmail400 a monthRead invoiceextracts the dataMatchvs. the orderAccountingmatchesReviewmismatch96 % untouched4 % reviewed72 h → 6 h a month
Before
72 h a month
Now
6 h a month

About 1,000 invoices a month, 4 minutes 20 seconds each on average. The 792 hours a year come from multiplying the difference by twelve.

This doesn't exist on the mainland.

The Canary Islands are outside the EU customs union and outside VAT. Every container generates a DUA, AIEM and IGIC, and no program splits those costs across product lines out of the box, because the problem never comes up for anyone in Madrid.

That means two things. The software you buy will never solve it by itself. And whoever solves it for you has to understand the DUA, not just the program.

Under the hood, this is applied artificial intelligence for reading the invoices and systems integration so the customs cost split lives in the ERP and not in a spreadsheet.

When I'll tell you no.

  • If you receive fewer than a hundred and fifty supplier invoices a month. The saving doesn't pay for the project and I will tell you so on the first call.
  • If nobody can sit down with me to write the splitting rules. Without that, what comes out will be a spreadsheet with a different name.
  • If the ERP is closed and has no way in or out. It can be done, but it gets much more expensive and that has to be said on day one.
  • If what you really need is to change the ERP. It is the most expensive and slowest option, and it is usually the last thing to do, not the first.
Fifteen minutes

I'll tell you whether it can be fixed and what it would cost.

Video or phone call, free and with no obligation. I reply myself, within 24 hours. If I see it isn't worth it, I tell you just the same.

I need to know your name.
I need a number to confirm the time.
Check the email, it looks incomplete.
Tell me, even in one line.
When suits you

Tick as many as you like. I fix the exact time when I confirm.

Or put it in writing with the 10-minute X-ray and I reply within 48 hours.