Document automation
Shipping document automation for fresh produce importers
Every container arrives with a packing list somebody has to read, a bill of lading somebody has to file, and a certificate somebody will need at exactly the wrong moment. Trackberry reads them out of your inbox and files them against the container — so the twenty to thirty minutes per container goes to zero and the cert is one click away a year later.
Free while in beta, then €10 a container · No commitment · No card required
- Carriers supported
- 435
- Shipments tracked
- 249
- Built for
- Fresh produce
The cost you are already paying
Manual document handling does not appear on any budget line, which is why it survives. It is distributed across the people who do it, in twenty-minute pieces, and each piece is too small to escalate. The way to see it is to multiply: containers per year, times the minutes a packing list takes, plus the times somebody went looking for a phytosanitary certificate that turned out to be in a colleague's inbox.
We measured the inputs rather than guessing at them, and published both the cost calculator and the underlying packing-list measurements as a file you can cite in your own business case. That is a deliberately awkward thing for a vendor to do — it lets you find out that the saving does not clear the bar at your volume — and it is the only version of the number worth showing you.
The error rate is the half nobody prices. A mistyped quantity or a wrong lot number does not cost twenty minutes; it costs a rejected delivery, or a claim you cannot support because the paperwork disagrees with the cargo.
What you get
Your inbox becomes the input
Suppliers keep emailing what they always emailed. Documents are read on arrival and matched to the shipment by container or bill of lading number — no portal for your suppliers to refuse to log into.
Packing lists, whatever shape they arrive in
PDF, Excel, scanned, or three orders on one sheet. Hidden columns and rows are skipped on purpose: they routinely hold another buyer's order, and importing them would quietly corrupt your shipment with somebody else's data.
Extracted values shown against the source
Every figure is displayed next to the document it came from, so verifying a line takes seconds. Automation you cannot check is automation you end up re-doing.
One click to any certificate
Phytosanitary certificates, EUR1s, certificates of origin, commercial invoices and CMRs filed against the container. When an inspector or a customer asks, the answer is not a search through eleven months of email.
The documents sit with the tracking
The same shipment record carries the milestones and the paperwork, so the question "what did we actually agree on this container" has one place to be answered.
Exports into what you already run
The extracted data comes out in a form your ERP or your spreadsheet can take. We are not trying to become your system of record.
A good fit if
- You receive shipment documents by email from suppliers who each format them differently.
- Somebody on your team retypes packing lists, and you could name who.
- You have been asked for a certificate you could not find quickly.
- Your container volume is high enough that twenty minutes each is a real number.
Probably not if
- Your suppliers already send structured EDI you can import — the problem is solved.
- You need documents written and issued, not read; this extracts, it does not originate.
- You want fully hands-off extraction with no human check. That is not what we sell.
- You need an on-premise deployment.
Questions buyers ask
- What document types can you read?
- Packing lists, bills of lading, commercial invoices, phytosanitary certificates, certificates of origin and EUR1s, and CMR delivery notes. Packing lists are the hard ones and the ones worth the most — every supplier formats them differently, and they are what the retyping is.
- Our suppliers send Excel files, not PDFs. Does that work?
- Yes, and Excel is often worse than PDF because of what it hides. We skip hidden columns and rows deliberately — they routinely contain another customer's order, and reading them would put data in your shipment that was never about your shipment.
- How accurate is it, really?
- Good enough that checking is faster than typing, and not good enough that you should not check. Extracted values are shown against the source document so a person can verify a line in seconds rather than re-deriving it. Anyone claiming hands-off accuracy on unstructured supplier documents is selling you a future reconciliation problem.
- Does it write into our ERP?
- Trackberry holds the extracted data and exports it; it is not an ERP replacement and does not need to be your system of record. What it removes is the manual step between a supplier's email and whatever you already run.
- How much is this actually worth?
- That depends on your container count and what your people cost, so rather than assert a number we published the calculator and the underlying measurements. Put your own volumes in and see whether it clears the bar.
- What happens to documents we send you?
- They are stored against your organisation's shipments and are not used to train anything shared across customers. The data processing terms are on the DPA page.
Forward one packing list
The demo that convinces people is their own worst-formatted supplier file. Send one, and see what comes back against the container it belongs to.