Arrival Notice OCR and Data Extraction

The notice number and issuer, B/L and booking references, consignee and notify party, vessel and voyage, ETA and arrival date, port of discharge and terminal, every container with size and seal, packages and weights, each charge line separately, and any printed free-time allowance, free-time start or last free day, plus the release requirement stated.

It extracts the last free day the notice prints. It does not compute one from an ETA and a free-day count, because free-time counting depends on the tariff's start event, its inclusive or exclusive convention and its treatment of weekends and holidays — all of which live in the contract rather than the notice. Use the demurrage calculator to check the printed date against the governing terms.

Once the last free day is a structured field on the shipment record, it becomes a tracked date visible against the shipment rather than a line in a PDF. That is what makes an alert possible at all — the extraction is the prerequisite, and the deadline stops depending on whoever happened to open the email.

Yes. Each charge is captured with its description, basis, amount and currency rather than as a single total, because a total cannot be audited. Charge blocks on arrival notices are frequently free text with agent-specific abbreviations, and lines that cannot be parsed confidently are surfaced for review rather than dropped.

Yes, by B/L number and by container numbers. Where the notice references a shipment already in the workspace, it is linked automatically. A container appearing on the notice that is not on the B/L — or the reverse — is reported as a discrepancy, because it may mean the notice relates to a different shipment or that equipment was substituted.

Many do, and they are handled the same way. Email intake accepts the message body as well as attachments, so a notice sent as formatted text is extracted rather than requiring somebody to save it as a file first. Forwarded chains and inline images are common and are processed as they arrive.

Yes, where the notice states it. The terminal is what haulage is booked against and what determines the appointment system you need, and a port-level record is not actionable. Terminal names are local shorthand with no standard dataset behind them, so they are captured as printed rather than normalised.

Yes. Free-time information is captured per container where the notice differentiates, which happens more often than people expect — containers discharged from different vessels or held for examination frequently carry different last free days on the same notice, sometimes stated only in a footnote.

No, and the distinction matters. An arrival notice informs you of arrival, charges and free time. Release requires the transport document surrendered or released, charges settled and customs cleared, and collection requires a delivery order. Holding a notice confers no entitlement to the cargo.

Raise it in writing immediately rather than at payment. Extracting the charge lines makes the comparison against your quotation fast, and the practical reality is that the carrier will generally not release cargo while charges are outstanding — so an unresolved dispute accrues demurrage. Speed matters more than the merits.

Yes. Reviewed data exports to Excel, CSV or structured JSON, and the JSON structure keeps container rows and charge lines as arrays rather than flattening them, so a downstream system receives the detail rather than a summary.

Yes. NVOCC and destination-agent notices are the more variable of the two — frequently free-text, frequently carrying both house and master references — and are handled with the same field model. Where the document does not label which reference is house and which is master, that ambiguity is surfaced for review rather than guessed.

The parser is layout-agnostic — it reads the document like a human would, then structures what it finds. Unrecognized extras are preserved rather than dropped.

Parsed dates are stored with the document. Automated LFD reminders are on the roadmap; today the Next Action engine surfaces the document for review.

Documents sharing a B/L number are grouped into the same shipment automatically, ready for cross-checking.

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