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The Certificate of Origin verifies the place of growth, production, and manufacture of goods. It contains a certification by an empowered authority.

Australia’s Department of Agriculture and Water Resources offers complete guidance to exporters for the smooth export documentation process. In order to ensure that your products are eligible for export (in other words, your products have met all important export quality requirements), you must be ready with all necessary documentary proofs. Here are some of the top requirements that the Department requires every exporter to fulfil.

Declaration of Compliance
As an exporter, you must provide the evidence that all the products you are planning to export to the foreign countries comply with the Export Control Act of 1982. For this, you need to prepare the decorations of compliance for each and every product category in the consignment.

Product Test Results
The products you wish to export must undergo a variety of inspections and tests for their export quality evaluation. This includes the products tests by the National Association of Testing Authorities. The results obtained from these tests must confirm that the export requirements as well as the company’s release criterions have been fulfilled.

Export Permit
You must raise the request for permit at the prescribed time before the intended date of shipment. You must essentially have the export permit issued before the goods are exported from the Australian shores.

Importing Country Requirements
Another important requirement is that the goods you export precisely meet the importing country’s requirements. For example, if you are exporting plants and plants based products, you must obtain and produce the Phytosanitary Certificate for export. If the goods consist of animals and animals based products, you must apply for the Health Certificate. For more information about the importing country requirements, you can refer to the Manual of Importing Country’s Requirements available with the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources.

Product Export Chain Requirements
It is the duty of the exporter to ensure that the products to be exported remain export quality compliant throughout the export chain. For example, the products should not have any quality compromises right from the procurement of ingredients to production to storage and so on. Also, if the products require cold storage throughout the export process, the exporter must ensure that the cold chain requirements are fulfilled until the products reach the final destination.

Make sure you maintain an export checklist so that none of these requirements is skipped.  

Prescribed goods for export from Australia are controlled by the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR). Some examples of these goods include milk and milk products, eggs, fish and fish products, meat and meat products, plants and plant products, live animals and so on. Exporters need to raise Request for Permit with DAWR which issues Health Certificate (for animals and animal products) and Phytosanitary Certificate (for plants and plant products). The main purpose of these certificates is to ensure that the goods being exported are free from contaminants/infections and comply with the importing country requirements.

Before DAWR issues these important export certificates, it authorizes inspection officers to inspect the export commodities. For example, Phytosanitary Certificate for export of plants products is issued only if they are inspected to be free of pests. Here are some preparations every exporter must make to avoid rejection:

Registered Establishment Requirement
The Export Control Order demands that the prescribed goods for export must be prepared or processed as well as inspected in a registered establishment. For this, the exporter must either:

• Get his or her premises registered with a local DAWR office or
• Find and use a registered establishment for the above-mentioned tasks

Prescribed Goods Transportation
You may need to transport prescribed goods intended for export from one registered establishment to another. In such cases:

• An authorized officer is responsible for supervising the transport
• The office must issue a transfer certificate
• The owner of the registered establishment where the goods are repacked must maintain the records like packing dates and original registered establishment

Packaging the Prescribed Goods
It is important that the goods are not packed into packages or loaded into containers before the inspection is complete or the authorized officer agrees to a prescribed method of inspection after packaging. In addition, it must be ensured that the packaging materials are unused and clean or cleaned after use (in case of multiple use materials). The containers must be in good condition to prevent any kind of contamination/infestation.

Do you know that the consignments delayed for more than 28 days after inspection must be reinspected to ensure the validity of issued certificates? Keeping these things in mind can save you from a lot of hassles.

Many issues associated with manual export documentation were addressed with the introduction of export documentation software systems. Then, the option to prepare export documents on cloud came into limelight and it further made the process even smoother and hassle-free. The exporters in Australia are willingly investing in cloud-based export preparation systems and enjoying all great benefits. Find out some concrete reasons to use cloud if you are an exporter struggling with the documentation part of your export activities.

To Save Costs
The costs associated with software installation, upgrading and maintenance at one’s office can be daunting. You would need to buy equipments for this and bear additional costs of maintaining them. Also, you may need to invest in creating on-site IT infrastructure that might keep on getting complex with the passage of time. The cloud-based software tools for export document preparation eliminate each of these requirements as these are accessible simply using web.

For Quick Deployment
Apart from minimizing the onsite IT architecture, cloud-based documentation tools also reduce the efforts and time involved in ensuring successful deployment. Once deployed, these solutions don’t demand frequent upgrading and customization as these needs would be taken care of by the vendors. With such great benefits, you would have more time and better focus to devote towards core export business activities.

To Avoid In-house IT Support
Installing premise-based software solutions for documentation creates an additional need of hiring IT support experts to keep these tools up and working. Being from a non-technical background, you may face hurdles while using these solutions and only the experts can take you out of these situations. In case of cloud documentation option, the vendors take up the responsibility to deal with the issues that arise and keep you worry-free.

To Adhere to Regulations
One of the most frustrating aspects of export documentation is to abide by the loads of norms and regulations associated with different export documents. Even a small mistake or error may lead to your entire efforts going into vain. On the other hand, cloud-based solutions directly interface with all important documents-approving authorities and maintain pace with the present and updated regulations which helps to prevent deviations that may otherwise prove to be damaging.

For Better Security
The valuable export-related data is constantly under threats if you are using a traditional software at your office. The cloud technology, on the other hand, is known to add many additional layers of security to ensure that there are negligible chances of any damage. For example, you are assured of protection against unauthorized access, damage caused due to natural and human disasters, viruses and other malicious programs and more once you migrate to cloud.

To Improve Overall Performance
The cloud would allow you much more flexibility to use the documentation tools from any device, from any location and at any point of time. Also, it makes export documentation management and reporting rather simpler, helping you to improve your export activities in the future.

Using a cloud-based solution, you can also make your export business much more competitive. In short, you must consider it as an essential investment and a need of the hour.

The Australian Border Force (ABF), earlier known as the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service, operates en electronic export clearance and reporting system known as the Integrated Cargo System (ICS). The system not only plays an important role in the operations supervised by the ABF but also is of great importance for the other agencies of the Australian Government. In addition, it offers benefits to the exporters who wish to export goods from Australia to other countries. Here you will earn about some of the most important roles of the ICS.

Accepting Export Declarations Electronically

The ICS allows the exporters from Australia to submit their export declarations with utmost convenience through the internet. If you are an exporter, you need to submit a declaration providing important details about the goods you are planning to export. Rather than doing it manually, you can do it electronically through the ICS. For this, you would need a software to interact with the ICS. After the system verifies and validates the details, it generates an export declaration number (EDN) which is an important entity without which nothing can be shipped from the country.

Monitoring Export Activities

One of the vital roles of the ICS is to keep a check on the possibilities of exporting high-risk goods and prohibited goods from Australia. The ABF maintains detailed lists and guides that provide information on which goods can’t be exported outside the country. Also, there are certain categories of prohibited goods that can be allowed for export only after the required documents are presented. The ICS monitors whether these requirements are fulfilled or not at the very initial stage.

Automating Export Reporting

The ABF is required to report the Australian government as well as industry bodies about the nature and volume of export that happens in a year or over a certain period of time. The ICS fully automates the process to ensure that the reports are available in a timely fashion to all the concerned parties.

The ICS reduces the traditional paper-based permits and reports and makes the export clearance extremely fast. The system is currently used by the majority of exporters to obtain EDN quickly and enjoy on-time shipping of export consignments.