[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by jonbxx

That's probably not true if you previously only ever imported from or exported to the EU. At worst if you were an exporter, you had to complete Eurostat submissions monthly and that was if you exported a lot.

In my company, we were lucky in that we have an EU based warehouse that shipped to EU and non-EU countries so there was some experience of the requirements for various levels of trade agreement with the EU. This meant we could war game various scenarios from no deal upwards on what might be required to ship to the UK.

The biggest difficulty was that we and our customers didn't know what was going to happen. For trade compliance lovers, our company ships using 'Delivered at Place' or DAP Incoterms meaning that we ship to our customer but they are liable for import clearance and duties. My customers did not know what that would mean to them until the 24th December. They could have some guesses but no clarity until a week before the deal, if any, would come in to effect.

in the meantime, our 12 customer service representatives had to be trained up on trade compliance issues that might or might not happen while at the same time handling the year end rush for orders and invoicing. We also had to sandbox test our order handling system for the most likely scenarios to make sure that they would all work if needed.

My company was lucky in having the resources in place to try and make this all as smooth as possible. Even then, the disruption was considerable with a team of 8 people working on this full time by November 2020. This is why they won an award from our CEO! Smaller companies would not have the resources to make the transition as smooth as it was for my company.

It's much like the old y2k thing - not much happened but that was because many, many people were working in the background to make sure nothing happened

A great post - thanks for taking the time to share your practical experience with the Forum.