Excise number

The number is issued with the authorisation and attaches to the trader, not to the goods. Its structure is the same across Europe: the first two characters name the member state, the remaining eleven identify the business. A company therefore often holds several numbers, one for the warehouse keeper and one for each approved tax warehouse.

In the e-AD the number appears twice, for the consignor and for the consignee, and both are checked against SEED. If either does not match, the consignment never enters the procedure. That is why it belongs in the trading partner's master data and not in an email it gets copied out of again next time.

When something about the authorisation changes, the number often changes with it. Reusing it without a check means relying on a state nobody has confirmed.

Two mix-ups keep happening. The first involves the VAT identification number and the EORI number: all three start with a country code, but only the excise number has 13 characters and applies solely under excise law. The second involves the warehouse keeper number and the warehouse number at companies running more than one tax warehouse, which formally sends the consignment to the wrong place.

EMCS rejects both, and the correction costs a day during which the goods do not move. Documenting the numbers separately per role and per warehouse location avoids losing that day.