10-29-2009, 01:24 PM
Jakensama Wrote:Do you get forwarders and consolidators doing cargo under 1 bill or on the trucking level is it pretty much by the individual shippers? I know when I was running the documentation department and generating bills of lading for a living shipping the same amount of cargo could have 1 or 100 bills of lading depending on the situation, but I imagine inlands quite different.
For Air/Ocean, Import/Export business you can get multiple shipments moving on a single House Bill of Lading.
It works that way because you are shipping goods based on "entry" not "ultimate destination". i.e., People don't want to pay brokerage charges on all the individual shipments in a container (That is why they move it in a container in the first place) so each container(s) are handled under a single entry. You only pay Duty and Taxes on each individual entry.
The only bad part of that is if you move 3 containers on a single entry if customs stops one container they all have to stop. Other then that it is just a huge cost savings in brokerage duty and taxes.
This only applies to entry and exit of the US border though.
Once inside the country everything moves on individual bills of lading. The exception being if you are delivering a single container to a single location. Even then you cut a domestic bill of lading to get it delivered.
Each US destination by law has to have a single bill of lading. The use of the word "law" in this case is pretty liberal since DOT laws are more like suggestions but that is another story for another thread.
So when you say "bill count" while it does not represent tonnage it does represent shipment count. Every shipment to every destination in the US does have a single bill of lading.
Vllad