Compu-Clearing system facilitates cross-border shipments

If you are involved in shipping consignments over-border between SA and the BLNS (Botswana- Lesotho-Namibia-Swaziland) countries, Compu-Clearing will solve a number of problems for you, according to technical director, Mario Acosta-Alarcon. One is the need for all the road shipments crossing into the BLNS states to have an individual single administrative document (SAD) declaration sent via electronic data interchange (EDI) to the SA Revenue Service (Sars). “We have a system ready for that,” said Acosta-Alarcon. “It has first and foremost been designed with all the Sars requirements built into the programme. “As another bonus, it offers all the other statistics on the shipment you may require – and these can be instantly selected, viewed and used for whatever other task you have in mind.” It also has an eagle eye when it comes to tracking your consignment, and the whole wealth of the system is accessible to any station that is connected to the internet. Unlike the old days, when shippers and transporters were besieged with all sorts of manual documents, and information had to be tediously recorded on both sides of the border, the Compu-Clearing system allows all the data to be moved around the cybernetwork, and to be instantly available to all the parties along the logistics chain. “This is designed to make a transporter’s life easier, and allows all the necessary documentation – including the vital SAD – to be posted and transferred to customs on both sides of the border,” said Acosta-Alarcon. The system is also linguistically adept, able to talk to the Asycuda system that is relatively common in other African states, and extensively used in Namibia and Botswana, for example. “This,” said Acosta-Alarcon, “is a system that was designed by the United Nations (UN) and distributed free to African countries – allowing the users to run all the customs and clearing procedures that are required. “But it effectively needs you to talk another tongue, and denies access to Asycuda if you can’t talk that language.” But Compu-Clearing has overcome that problem, and is now successfully integrated with the Asycuda system. “So our users, particularly sending goods to Botswana or Namibia, do not have to capture a declaration twice – once on both sides of the border,” said Acosta-Alarcon. “We will directly transfer the data from one computer system to the other.”