Export Workflow Platform
Kritva Global · 2024–25 · Director
Context
Kritva Global is my family's textile export business, shipping roughly $50M of goods out of India a year. I was running ops, and the export desk was where the most time went and the most things quietly went wrong. This is what I built to fix it.
The Problem
Exporting from India means producing a stack of documents for every shipment — Commercial Invoice, Packing List, Pro Forma Invoice, Shipping Bill, Bill of Lading, Certificate of Origin, Insurance Certificate, and a handful of compliance documents on top.
The same shipment information gets typed in over and over, across different documents and different systems. So one number drifts. The quantity on the Packing List doesn't match the Invoice, an HSN code is off, a carton count is wrong, a product description reads differently on two documents. Customs notices, and a mismatch that took two seconds to create turns into a queried shipment, a delay, and a cost.
On top of the data entry, the team was validating everything by hand, going back and forth with the customs broker, and tracking where each shipment stood across spreadsheets, email threads, and shared folders. There was no single place that told you the truth about a shipment.
The Solution
I built an export platform around one idea: a single shipment record is the source of truth for everything that follows. The team stops creating documents one at a time and instead creates a shipment once, entering the buyer, the purchase order, the products, quantities, pricing, destination, container details, and Incoterms.
From that one record, the platform generates the documents:
- Commercial Invoice
- Packing List
- Pro Forma Invoice
Because every document is drawn from the same record, they can't disagree with each other. The whole class of error where one figure was updated in three places and missed in a fourth simply goes away.
Compliance & Validation
Before anything is finalized, the platform runs the shipment through a set of automated checks:
- HSN code verification
- Export restriction checks
- Sanctions and blacklist screening
- Mandatory field validation
- Country-specific export requirements
- Export incentive eligibility
Anything that looks off gets flagged while it's still cheap to fix — before the documents reach the customs broker, not after the shipment has been queried.
Customs Package
Once a shipment clears validation, the platform assembles a customs-ready package for the CHA: all the shipment information and supporting documents needed for filing, in one place and in a consistent format. Filing itself stays with the broker — what changed is that the broker now receives something complete and standardized instead of a folder to reconcile, which is where most of the manual prep and re-keying used to happen.
Document Repository
Documents that only show up later in the shipment's life — the Bill of Lading, Certificate of Origin, inspection and insurance certificates, the customs paperwork — get uploaded and linked back to the same shipment record as they arrive. Every shipment ends up with its full paper trail in one record instead of scattered across inboxes.
Tracking & Post-Shipment
The record keeps working after the goods leave. Each shipment carries its status, its key export milestones, payment due dates, documentation status, export incentive claims, and whatever's still outstanding. The team can see where every shipment stands without opening a spreadsheet or chasing a thread.
Results
The same shipment data is now entered once and flows into every document, so the documents stay consistent and the mismatches that used to trigger customs queries don't get created in the first place. Validation runs up front, the customs package goes to the broker complete, and every shipment keeps a full record of its documents, status, and incentive claims. The export process got faster and the administrative overhead dropped, but the real win was taking out the documentation errors that used to delay shipments.