Dutch Customs Integration

Newminds built a customs integration for clients in the Dutch agricultural trade sector — specifically businesses dealing in potatoes and onions, where seasonal export volumes are high and documentation requirements are strict. Before the integration existed, shipping staff manually re-entered data from their ERP into a third-party customs handling platform to generate documents like EUR1 certificates and CVOs. The process was slow, error-prone, and bottlenecked heavily during peak export season.

Approach

My role was to implement the integration within Microsoft Dynamics Business Central 2018, written in AL. The core challenge was data mapping: taking the shipment records already living inside Business Central and transforming them into the XML structure expected by the customs handler’s API. That structure was non-trivial — a single customs document could contain many line items, and the schema had to be correct in full before submission. There was no partial success. I mapped each field carefully between the two systems, accounting for edge cases in how line-level data was structured on our side versus what the external API expected.

Solution

The finished integration let clients generate and submit EUR1 and CVO documents directly from within Business Central, without ever leaving their ERP. Shipment data already entered into the system flowed through the integration, was transformed into valid XML, and was filed electronically with the customs handler — the same platform staff had been typing into by hand.

Outcome

Customs document submission went from a manual, error-prone task to a fully automated step in the shipping workflow. During high-season export periods, the time savings were most felt: staff no longer had to context-switch between systems or risk transcription errors on documents with legal and trade compliance implications.