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We've spent the past two years building the tool we wished existed when we were managing LCs ourselves. Today, it's live.

Nobody budgets for the cost of a discrepancy. Nobody tracks the hours spent rebuilding an LC timeline from email threads. But those costs are real.

The Certificate of Origin is three fields on a single page. It's also the document that trips up exporters who've been doing this for twenty years.

Ask anyone who's presented documents to the same bank twice and they'll tell you: every bank has its quirks. The problem is, nobody writes them down.

Banks have spent billions digitising their side of trade finance. The exporter preparing documents on the other side is copying and pasting from last month's Word template.

Every experienced document checker has a system. Most of them learned it by getting burned. Here's the system, without the burns.

Article 31 and Article 32 look similar on the page. One covers partial shipments. The other covers instalment shipments.

The bill of lading is the most important document in an LC presentation. It proves the goods were shipped. It's a document of title.

An amendment isn't a quick fix. It's a round trip through two banks, a buyer, and a seller — each with their own timeline and fee schedule.

The 21-day clock starts ticking the moment goods are loaded onto the vessel. Not when your freight forwarder sends you the bill of lading.

UCP 600 has 39 articles. If you're an exporter preparing documents, about 10 of them will directly affect whether you get paid.

Nobody ever lost sleep over a packing list. Which is exactly why packing lists keep causing problems.

The first time you receive a letter of credit, it looks like someone filled out a tax form in a foreign language. Field numbers instead of headings.

Somewhere right now, a document examiner at a bank is typing a refusal notice because a street name is misspelled. The shipment was fine. The goods arrived intact.