The trade's own words
Most Pakistani firms in this business do not call themselves freight forwarders. They call themselves clearing and forwarding agents, because that is what the work is: get it through customs, then get it moved. The two halves are usually run in two systems and reconciled by hand at month end. They do not have to be.
The problem
The split is usually accidental. A house buys a clearing package because customs work came first, then buys or builds something for the forwarding side, and from then on a single consignment has two identities: a GD number in one system and a job number in the other. Nothing links them but a clerk.
The costs of that are predictable and every C&F house recognises them. Duty paid on a client's behalf sits in one place and the freight invoice in another, so nobody can say what a file earned until someone adds it up by hand. A customer gets two bills for one consignment. A disputed charge takes two searches. And the sales tax register has to be assembled rather than run.
What follows is not a claim that this system files your declarations — it does not, and that is said again below in as many words. It is a claim about the record: the clearing references and the forwarding documents hang off one job, and the money from both sides posts to one ledger.
The clearing side
Every item below is a field on the job screen for the mode it belongs to, not a note in a remarks box.
A named field on the sea-export, sea-import, air-export and air-import screens, and on the loading programme. A file cleared by an outside agent still records who cleared it.
An Instrument Type of Form E, Fin. Inst., EPZ NOC or GD, with Form E number and date in three sets, EPZ NOC No, GD No, and the financial instrument number and date beside them.
IGM No and date, B/E No and date, Index No and Sub Index No, HS Code, NOC Valid Date, Guarantee No, VIR Number, Cust Ref No — and the D/O number and issue date that end the clearance.
S/B No, S/B Place and S/B Date, M/R No and date, EGM No, and the customs clearance date and time on the shipment-status board.
The air waybill tracking block records Custom Clearance (Local Hub) and Custom Clearance At Destination (Foreign Hub) as separate milestones, each with a date, a time and a tick — the same pair the courier consignment carries.
A Document Receipt screen with its own number series, a documents grid on the import job holding document, number, date and remarks, and the Documents Received, Documents Dispatch and Shipper Received dates on the job itself.
The container security schedule — instrument, number, date, amount — totalled into Total Security Receivable and Balance Security Receivable, so guarantees still outstanding are a figure rather than a folder.
Weboc Id, PSW Id and GD/Lic./AC No are held on the customer or vendor account in the chart of accounts, with both passwords stored encrypted and never sent back to a browser.
The join
This is the part that actually pays for itself, and it is mostly about columns and accounts rather than features.
A local invoice bills freight, service charges and clearance on one document. The Sale Tax Register then keeps Custom Clea. and Service Charges as separate columns with separate totals, so the split survives onto the report.
The party-wise Sale Tax Register carries an S.B. / GD No. column beside the sub-agent party. That column is the whole argument of this page in miniature.
Amounts paid to customs on a client's behalf go on Other Charges Payable against the payable type Custom Authority, so they show up in the payables ledger like any other liability.
System Configuration carries a Custom Clearance block naming both sides of the entry for each mode — CC Other Charges Air Export, Sea Export, Air Import, Sea Import and Custom, each with a credit and a debit code — plus a Custom Duty Taxes account.
The Job-Wise Gross Profit/Loss Report totals sales, payable, cost and gross profit per job — which is only a meaningful number because both halves of the file are on one record to begin with.
Finalising a money document writes its own balanced journal voucher in PKR, checked debit-against-credit to the paisa before it is allowed to save. Un-finalising deletes it again.
Scope
Read this section first if you are evaluating. It is shorter to find the deal-breaker here than in week three.
There is no WeBOC or PSW integration. GD, B/E, IGM and index numbers are keyed by your staff or brought in by CSV. If you are looking for a system that lodges declarations, this is not it, and no amount of demo will change that.
HS Code is a text field. There is no tariff table, no valuation logic and no duty engine. What you paid is captured as a payable; what you owe is worked out where it always was.
Tax on what you buy is not carved out of a payable and there is no purchase-tax register. The system computes output tax only. The sales-tax page sets out exactly what that means for a return.
A withholding percentage can be keyed on a payable, but only the sales side books it — to Advance Income Tax as a recoverable asset. What you deduct from a vendor is not credited to a withholding-payable account, so that part of a return is still done outside.
A known defect on the settlement side: editing a receipt voucher that already allocates against invoices can lose those allocations. It is on the list, and until it is fixed the safe habit is to check the allocations after any edit.
Next
If your firm answers to "clearing and forwarding", the question worth asking is not whether a system has a job screen. It is whether the GD number and the job number are on the same record.