PAS 41201:2026 · For UK customs clearance agents and customs brokers
What does a manual declaration audit actually cost you?
PAS 41201:2026 sets a floor for checking your own work. Every quarter, on a minimum sample. Most intermediaries have never costed what that takes to run by hand.
Put your own figures in below. We supply no numbers and make no assumptions about your operation. The arithmetic is yours.
The standard asks intermediaries to conduct annual audits of systems and processes and quarterly quality control audits on submitted declarations at a minimum sample size of 5 per cent up to a maximum of 25,000.
Your figures
The starting values below are illustrative only. Replace every one of them with your own.
Count working time only. Retrieving the entry, reading each document, matching the data elements, judging whether a mismatch is an error or a permitted variance, checking the treatment against the rules, and recording the finding. Do not count time spent waiting for a reply.
A 37.5-hour week net of 28 days statutory leave is 1,740 hours. Use whatever your business actually runs.
What that costs
Every figure below is derived from what you entered.
Cost a year to run your sample by hand
£7,543
at £20.11 an hour
And if you checked all of them
£150,862
7,500 working hours a year, or 4.31 full-time people.
The sample is what you chose to check. The full population is what your principal is exposed to. MyCustomsInfo® audits every declaration in the cycle, and produces the record as a by-product of the work rather than as an exercise you have to staff.
Manual against MyCustomsInfo®
£7,543
That is your break-even. Any annual subscription below this figure costs you less than running the minimum sample by hand, and covers every declaration rather than 250. Put your quoted figure in the box on the left to see the comparison.
Want the worked breakdown?
We will send the calculation back to you, step by step, with the figures you entered.
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Every figure on this page is produced from the values you entered. MyCustomsInfo® makes no claim about your error rate, your document completeness or your cost base.
Why the sample is the expensive part
A sample tells you about the sample. It does not tell you about the entries you did not look at, and it does not tell your principal anything about theirs. It still has to be run, recorded and produced on request.
The check is analysis, not admin
Seeing that two figures differ is the easy part. Deciding whether the difference is an error, a permitted variance or a missing document takes someone who knows the regime. That is why the rate you put in the calculator matters as much as the minutes.
The cheaper checker is the cheaper sample
Staff the sample at the lowest rate and it becomes affordable, because it stops finding anything. PAS 41201:2026 pushes back from its own side, with induction, CPD and commodity coding requirements for the people doing this work.
Chasing documents does not scale
An entry you cannot finish sits open while you wait on someone else. Multiply that by a quarterly sample and the cadence, not the cost, becomes the problem you cannot solve with overtime.
Scope, stated plainly. PAS 41201:2026 applies to your organisation, not to your software. MyCustomsInfo® is not in scope of the standard, does not deliver conformity and is not a certification body. It produces evidence you can put in front of an assessor. Two of the six requirement areas sit almost entirely outside software. Training runs through CIET, the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade. Crisis response has no owner but you.
See the evidence before you commit to anything
Send us a sample of your declarations. We will run them through MyCustomsInfo® at no charge and show you the evidence the platform would hold, mapped to the requirement areas an assessor will ask about. No obligation to buy anything. You keep the output either way.
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