Landed Cost & Import Management

The problem

An imported item costs far more than its purchase order price. By the time it is on your shelf it has absorbed ocean or air freight, terminal handling, customs duty at a rate that depends on its tariff classification and country of origin, brokerage, insurance, inland drayage, demurrage if the container sat too long, and whatever surcharge the forwarder invented that quarter. Most of those costs arrive weeks after the goods, on invoices from four different parties, denominated in currencies that were not the currency of the purchase order.

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations has a landed cost capability, and for straightforward importers it does the job. Where it runs out of road is the operational half of importing: tracking a voyage from booking through vessel departure, arrival, customs entry and delivery; holding the customs documentation against that voyage; apportioning a brokerage invoice across three purchase orders and forty items when the invoice arrives after the goods have already been received and partly sold; and reconciling an estimated duty accrual against an actual entry summary. That gap is why so many importers end up maintaining a costing spreadsheet in parallel with F&O — and why the inventory value in the ledger drifts away from what the goods actually cost.

The consequences are concrete. Margin reporting by item is wrong, sometimes badly, because gross margin is calculated against a purchase price that ignored a third of the cost. Duty accruals are guesses that finance writes off at year end. Nobody can answer where a container is without emailing the forwarder. And when customs asks for the entry documents for a shipment from two years ago, somebody starts searching a shared drive.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build an X++ extension model deployed into your Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations environment as a separate package. Extension classes, chain-of-command, table and form extensions only — no overlayering of standard objects.

Voyage and shipment tracking

We add a voyage entity that sits above purchase orders. A voyage carries the mode (ocean FCL, ocean LCL, air, road, rail), the carrier or forwarder, vessel or flight identifier, container numbers, bill of lading or air waybill reference, port of loading and discharge, and a set of milestone dates — booked, cargo ready, departed, estimated arrival, actual arrival, customs cleared, delivered. Purchase order lines are assigned to a voyage, and a single voyage can carry lines from many purchase orders and many vendors, which is what actually happens with consolidated containers.

Milestones drive visibility. A workspace shows every open voyage with its current milestone and days to arrival, and a batch job flags voyages that have passed their estimated arrival without an actual arrival date so somebody chases it before the goods are late.

Cost apportionment

This is the core. We add a charge model where any cost — freight, duty, insurance, terminal handling, brokerage, drayage, demurrage — is captured as a charge line against a voyage, a container within a voyage, or a specific purchase order line. Each charge carries its own currency and exchange rate and is apportioned to receiving lines by a method you choose per charge type: by value, by net weight, by gross weight, by volume, by quantity, by unit count, or by a fixed manual split you enter.

Charges can be estimated at booking and actualised later. When the actual invoice arrives, the extension calculates the difference against the estimate and posts the adjustment through the standard inventory adjustment and cost adjustment machinery, so items already sold pick up the correction through the standard recalculation and closing process rather than through a manual journal. All posting uses your existing ledger dimensions, main accounts and posting profiles — we register additional charge codes and posting setup, we do not create a shadow ledger.

Duty and tariff

We add tariff classification to the released product with country of origin, HS or HTS code, preferential trade agreement eligibility and a duty rate table effective-dated by country pair and code. Estimated duty is calculated at booking from the classification and the declared customs value, using the valuation basis you configure — the customs value is frequently not the invoice value, and the extension models that explicitly. When the actual entry summary comes back from your broker, the actual duty is captured against the voyage and reconciled against the estimate, with the variance visible before it is posted.

Customs documentation

Commercial invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, certificates of origin, entry summaries and broker correspondence are attached to the voyage using the standard document management framework, so they inherit your existing storage, security and retention configuration. Document type requirements are configurable per mode and per country, and a voyage can be blocked from being marked cleared while a mandatory document is missing.

Data, integration and workflow

Every new table is exposed as a data entity in the data management framework with OData enabled, so voyage status, charge detail, duty reconciliation and true landed unit cost by item are available to Power BI, the Excel add-in and any downstream system. Where your forwarder or broker publishes milestone or charge data electronically, we build an inbound integration to populate voyages and charge lines automatically; where they do not, we ship import templates so a spreadsheet from the forwarder becomes charge lines in one import rather than forty manual entries. Charge actualisation above a tolerance you set routes through F&O workflow for approval before it posts.

Who this is for

Importers running Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations who buy goods across borders and need the true cost of those goods in inventory rather than in a spreadsheet. Distributors and manufacturers with consolidated containers carrying multiple vendors' goods. Multi-entity groups where an intermediate entity imports and on-sells, and each legal entity needs its own duty setup and charge posting. If you buy domestically and pay a single freight charge on the purchase order, standard F&O charges already cover you.

How delivery works

Scoping call. We map your import process end to end: modes, forwarders, brokers, the charges you actually incur and who invoices them, your apportionment rules today, how duty is calculated for your product range, and which documents you must retain and for how long. We confirm your F&O version, environment topology and LCS ownership.

Fixed quote. A written scope stating the charge types, apportionment methods, duty logic, document requirements and any forwarder or broker integrations by name, with a fixed price and delivery window. Changes are quoted before work starts.

Build. ECOSIRE develops against a build environment on your version. You get source access, a mid-build demonstration and a pre-handover demonstration.

Install in test. A deployable package goes to your LCS project and into your sandbox. We configure charge codes, apportionment defaults, tariff classifications and document requirements, then run your real historical shipments through the model and compare the resulting landed unit cost against your existing spreadsheet line by line. Sign-off is on your numbers, not ours.

Production. After acceptance, the same package is promoted through your normal release process. We attend the go-live and stay available while the first voyages are costed and the first duty reconciliation runs.

Support. A defined support window after go-live for defect correction, apportionment adjustments and questions from finance and logistics.

Build-to-order means this is written for your charge structure, your tariff range and your posting setup. Typical delivery is two to four weeks from a signed quote, depending on the number of charge types and whether forwarder or broker integrations are in scope.