SEED

SEED is not a portal you sign up to but a register: each member state maintains the part covering its own traders and makes it available to the others through a shared interface. Everyone holding an excise authorisation is listed, which means warehouse keepers, registered consignees and registered consignors. For daily work what counts is SEED on Europa, the public enquiry service of the European Commission, where an excise number can be checked against three things: validity, period and the product categories covered.

The right moment for that check is before the transport is booked, not before unloading. An authorisation can have lapsed without the trading partner mentioning it, and a number that only covers wine will not carry a consignment of spirits. EMCS runs the same comparison when the e-AD is submitted and rejects the draft if it does not add up. The goods then sit in the yard although the lorry is already booked.

Record the result with the date and the number checked, because the state of a register cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

The most common error is the inherited number. A consignor serves the same consignee again and copies the excise number from the previous consignment although the authorisation has since changed or been withdrawn. The second is the wrong product scope: the number is valid but does not cover the category being shipped.

Both only surface when the e-AD is submitted, and then they cost waiting time instead of five minutes of research. Anyone shipping to the same addresses regularly is better off checking master data on a fixed rhythm than at the moment of dispatch.