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Everything below is written for the business paying the invoices. Everything below is rewritten for accountants, bookkeepers and brokers.
Recovery for Australian importers

Destination charges. Storage fees.Duty you never owed.

The cheap freight quote wasn't. We audit four years of your customs duty, check every freight invoice before you pay it, and reclaim the duty that leaves when your goods do. We're paid only from what we bring back.

For accountants, bookkeepers and customs brokers

Your clients are owed money.You'll be the one who found it.

Australian importers routinely overpay customs duty for four years without anyone noticing, because nobody's job is to look backwards. We do that work, under your client's name, and hand you the credit for raising it. A duty refund is duty only — no BAS amendment, no reworked periods, one journal.

File no. 0001 · specimen
ImporterCOASTLINE TRADING PTY LTD
Entries examined212
PeriodAUG 2022 – AUG 2026
Oldest claimable entry10 MONTHS LEFT
Invoices checked312
Marked for recovery$49,650
Exposure disclosed$4,180
Landed by EFT$12,300
Referrer's sharedisclosed in dollars
Specimenfictional client
32%of the declaration lines the Border Force selects for checking are in error — ABF, FY24-25
$711min refunds and drawbacks paid out by the government last year
4 yearsthe legal window to reclaim overpaid duty
48 hoursevery freight invoice checked before you pay it
1 journalwhat a refund costs you in rework — no BAS amendment, GST already claimed
Exhibit A

One invoice. Four things wrong with it.

An ordinary door-to-door invoice for one container — the kind that arrives every week and gets paid because arguing costs more than the money. Here it is with the red pen on it.

This is the document that passes through your clients' accounts payable every week, coded and paid without a second look. Four of its nine lines are wrong, and none of it is visible from the ledger.

In plain terms: some charges on a freight invoice are set by published price lists anyone can look up. If the invoice says a different number, that difference is simply an error — no argument, no interpretation, just arithmetic.
Forwarder invoice · TG-88214 · 1×40′ Shanghai → Port BotanyHold
ChargeInvoicedCorrect
Ocean freight — as quoted QT-22113,240.003,240.00
Terminal access — Patrick Port Botany268.00224.90
Customs clearance185.00185.00
Agency fee95.0095.00
Agency fee95.000.00
Container hire — 4 days beyond free time1,340.000.00
Cartage — metro420.00420.00
Marine cover — per shipment312.00129.00
GST595.50595.50
Total invoiced6,550.504,889.40
① Published rate

Patrick's own notice sets the Port Botany import landside charge at $224.90 from 1 Jan 2026. Invoiced at $268.00.

−$43.10
② Charged twice

The same agency fee appears on two lines of one invoice.

−$95.00
③ Clock started early

Hire billed from discharge. This line's own tariff runs free time from container availability — four days later. The park refused returns until day 4; the evidence is in the carrier's own notice.

−$1,340.00
④ Cover, priced twice over

Per-shipment marine cover at 2.4× the annual open-cover rate — and arranged under the seller's terms, so it may not protect the buyer at all.

−$183.00
Recomputed−$1,661.10

Checked against Patrick Terminals' published landside charges effective 1 January 2026, and against arithmetic on the invoice itself. Rate table v1 — sources listed.

What this means for a practice: your client's freight spend is one of the few remaining cost lines where errors are provable from public data rather than argued. That makes it advisable rather than adversarial — and it's a conversation nobody else is having with them.
The working desk · free · nothing to sign

Find out what you're owed, in about ninety seconds.

Find out what a client is owed, in about ninety seconds.

Start with an invoice that felt wrong. We'll name every charge on it, tell you which ones exceed the published rate, and write the letter that gets the money back. Four steps, in order — you can stop at any of them.

Step one

Drop in the invoice that felt wrong.

We name every line, flag the ones above their published rate, catch anything billed twice, and check the GST adds up. About fifteen seconds.

Choose a PDF invoice

or drag it here — nothing leaves your computer

Your file is opened by your own browser and never sent anywhere — and you don't have to take our word for it: open your Network tab and watch. The same is true of every calculation on this page.

Uses a specimen invoice so you can see exactly what the check does.
Step two

What should those charges have been?

Add each line as it appears on the invoice. Each one is looked up in the operator's own published schedule — including storage, where the largest errors live and where a single container can run past a thousand dollars a day.

Step three

Was that container hire actually payable?

Each shipping line starts its free-time clock on a different event, and getting that wrong is the most common overcharge in the trade. Same container, four days apart, can be an $840 difference.

In plain terms: you get a number of free days before hire charges start. Some lines count from the day the ship unloads; others from the day the container is actually available to collect. Those can be days apart — and you pay for every one of them.
Daily rate — most lines charge in tiers

Set tier 2 and 3 to the same figure if your line charges flat. These numbers come off your own invoice or rate agreement — we don't guess at your contract.

Should duty be payable on this at all?

A bounded, hand-checked list covering the goods and origins where we most often find money.

Step four

Now get the money back.

The letter cites the operator's own published rate with its effective date and follows the carrier's own dispute formalities — because one that ignores those gets closed unread. Free, no email, yours to send.

Screen your client book

Two parts: what the book is worth in total, and which specific clients to look at first. Both run entirely on your machine — your client list is never transmitted, which is deliberate rather than decorative: under APES 110 you could not use a version that uploaded it. Open your Network tab and watch.

Now find which clients to start with

Paste your importing clients below — one per line, comma separated: name, annual import spend, main origin, what they bring in. It is scored against the origin-and-commodity patterns where we most often find unclaimed money.

Published charges only. These checks can't see quotes, declarations or certificates of origin — that's what the four-year audit is for.

The file · Coastline Trading Pty Ltd · specimen

Four years, read line by line.

A fictional importer, real rules. This is what the first look produces — including the part most people don't show you.

A fictional client, real rules — so you can see exactly what lands on your desk, what it does to the books, and where your name sits in it.

2023 · entries 1–58 · the clock is real

Certificates they already had

Forty-seven entries of Chinese-origin seating came in at the general rate of 5%. The certificates of origin that make them duty-free were already in the client's own shipping folder — issued, valid, never claimed. No supplier chasing. Just a claim.

The oldest of these entries had ten months left on its four-year window when we found it. Another eighteen months and the money would simply have stopped being claimable — which is the quiet cost of nobody's job being to look backwards.

ChAFTA Art. 3.15Customs Act s16347 entries10 months left
+ $23,100
In the books: a refund of duty only. GST was claimed as an input credit at the time and is unaffected — no BAS amendment, no prior-period rework. One receipt, one journal.
2024 · entry 96

A concession nobody applied

Powder-coated shelving assessed at 5%. A tariff concession order covering exactly these goods was in force at the time of entry and was never claimed — the goods aren't made in Australia, which is the entire point of the concession.

TCO 2019/113Sch 6, item 15verified against the register22 months left
+ $17,900
2024 · entries 121–133 · the part nobody advertises

And here's what they owe

Thirteen entries of a mixed lighting range were classified into a duty-free line that doesn't fit them. That's an underpayment of $4,180 — ours to find and theirs to fix. We prepare the voluntary disclosure and lodge nothing else until it's resolved, because a refund claim filed over a known problem is how a routine refund becomes an audit.

voluntary disclosurepenalty protection retainedboth directions, always
− $4,180
Why this protects you: the risk in refund work isn't the refund, it's claiming over an unknown liability. We look both ways before anything is lodged — so an introduction from you never turns into a problem you have to explain.
2025 · the way back out

Duty that left with the goods

Thirty-eight cartons went to New Zealand customers and a pallet of faulty stock went back to the supplier. Duty was paid on all of it at the border, and duty comes back when goods are exported. Nobody had ever claimed it. This one repeats every quarter, for as long as they trade.

Customs Act s168 — drawback4 years from exportrecurring
+ $3,800
2026 · continuing

Charges checked before they're paid

Three hundred and twelve invoices audited against published tariffs, the client's own quotes, and each shipping line's hire rules. Two disputes open, one credit note already applied and verified against the following month's invoice.

312 invoices48-hour verdictscredits tracked to application
+ $4,850
Landed

Money in the account

The May refund arrived by EFT from the Border Force — thirty-one days after the client pressed send. Our invoice followed the money, never preceded it.

EFT · ABF31 dayspaid
$12,300 recovered to date
Marked for recovery
$49,650
Certificates held$23,100
Concession missed$17,900
Exported goods$3,800
Freight charges$4,850
Disclosed to ABF−$4,180
Landed by EFT
$12,300
May refund $8,000 · credits applied $4,300
Referrer's share at 15%
$1,845
on recoveries banked · waivable to the client
Seven days · specimen

The file is what we find. This is what having us is like.

MON 09:12Toll invoice TG-88214 arrives in the forwarding inboxreceived
TUE 08:47Checked against quote QT-2211 and published tariffs — cleancleared to pay
TUE 16:20Maersk hire invoice — clock started before the container was availablehold · $480
WED 11:03An email arrives changing the forwarder's bank details. Payment held automatically and verified by phone on the number already on file. The details were false.fraud held
THU 07:30Wednesday's gazette: a fumigation provider suspended — certificates void retroactively, one container at sea affectedclient warned
FRI 10:00Monthly pack to the bookkeeper — declarations reconciled, deferred GST predicted, coding checklist attachedBAS ready

Payment redirection cost Australian businesses $152.6 million in 2024. Every invoice that changes bank details is held until a person confirms it on a number we already hold.

What it looks like from your side

Four touches. Then it runs without you.

STEP 1You forward one paragraph to a client who imports. We do the rest of the explaining.five minutes
STEP 2They sign a one-page authority. The Border Force sends their four-year history directly — no broker involved, no system access, nothing touching your files.their signature
STEP 3We audit both directions and give them a written finding. If there's an exposure, they hear it before anything is lodged.our work
STEP 4Money lands with your client, by EFT from the Border Force. You receive a one-page instruction sheet for the books and, if you want it, a disclosed referral share. You were the one who raised it.one journal

Nothing to learn

You don't need to know tariff classification, and you never have to defend a technical position. We write the finding, we cite the rule, and the client lodges under their own name.

Nothing to reconcile

Duty only. GST was already claimed as an input credit and is untouched — so there's no BAS amendment, no prior-period adjustment, and no reopening of finalised accounts.

Nothing to disclose awkwardly

If you take a referral share we give you the disclosure paragraph, drafted to sit inside your existing engagement terms — or you waive it to the client and simply look good. Both are normal.

The checks, by name

Dense on purpose. This is the product.

On every declaration

Tariff classificationthe goods against the Working Tariff, not a cached library
Concession orders15,000 live orders, re-gazetted every Wednesday
Trade-agreement ratesnine agreements, each with its own paperwork and clocks
Certificates already heldthe client's own archive searched first — four years claimable, no chasing
Valuationcurrency, freight-in-value, rebates, year-end price adjustments
Both directionsunderpayments found first, with the penalty-protected path to fix them

On every invoice

Published pass-throughsterminal access, storage, booking and park fees, to the cent
Container hire clockseach line's own rules: from discharge, availability, or sailing
Quote against invoiceevery line against what was agreed, inside the dispute window
Duplicates and phantomscharges that appear twice, and fees with no service behind them
The insurance linecover checked against the market — and whether it protects the buyer at all
Changed bank detailsheld automatically, verified by voice before anything is paid

On the way out, and ahead

Export matchingevery export matched to the import that paid duty on it
Returns to suppliersfaulty and unsold stock going back — duty claimable
Order-time preventionthe right origin document requested with the purchase order
Provider watchtreatment certificates validated before and during the voyage
Landed cost per productwhat each line actually costs to put on the floor
The monthly packthe bookkeeper's reconciliation, ready before the BAS is due
The deal · priced in the open

No cure, no pay. Here's the actual arithmetic.

What the client pays, and what you receive.

Duty recovered$23,100
Our share — 25%$5,775
Referrer's share — 15% of ours$866
Paid to youPaid to your client by the Border Force$17,325

Our share steps down as recoveries grow, with a minimum claim size and a cap on the largest wins. Freight auditing is billed per container checked, with a monthly floor. Nothing is payable until the money has landed — and the fee is calculated on duty only, never on GST.

You can do this without us

Refunds of overpaid customs duty are a statutory right. The form is B653, it's free, and you email it to the Border Force yourself. If you have the time and the tariff knowledge, do exactly that — you'll keep 100%.

What we sell is the finding, the evidence, and the four years of arithmetic behind it. If we find nothing, you owe nothing and you've lost nothing but an authority letter.

Your client can do this without us

And we say so on this page, in writing. Refunds are a statutory right; the form is free; the Border Force accepts it by email. What's being bought is the systematic look backwards — four years, every line, both directions — which is nobody's job inside a practice and nobody's job inside a brokerage.

Referral terms are disclosed in dollars to the client, drafted to sit inside your existing engagement letter, and waivable to the client if you'd rather the goodwill than the fee.

Nothing up front, ever

Never your agent

We never lodge with the Border Force as anyone's agent. Every claim goes out under the client's own name — they press send, we stand behind the working.

Never your GST

Duty only, in every estimate and every fee. The BAS agent gets a one-page instruction sheet for the rest.

Never one-sided

We check both directions. If there's an underpayment, it's disclosed first, with the safe path to fix it.

Never holding the money

Refunds flow from the Border Force to the client. Our invoice follows the money landing — never the other way around.

Never an undisclosed commission

If a partner pays us for an introduction, the dollar figure is shown before anyone decides anything.

Never your data, traded

Australian-hosted, encrypted, never used to train anything, deleted on request with a certificate.

Start here

Get your number.

Tell us your website and roughly what you bring in. We read your product range against the tariff, the trade agreements and the concession register, and come back within two business days with a range and the assumptions behind it.

No cost. No obligation. No meeting unless you want one. If the number looks worth chasing, the next step is a one-page authority letter — the government's own template — and the Border Force sends four years of your import history directly.

What we will not do: ask for bank details, ask for money, contact your broker, or contact your forwarder. Nothing happens to your account, your goods or your relationships because you asked a question.
Start here

Have a look at one client.

The honest way to test this is one file, not a partnership. Pick a client who imports, we'll do the estimate at no cost, and you decide afterwards whether it's worth introducing anyone else.

If you'd rather start with the paperwork: we'll send the disclosure paragraph for your engagement terms, the one-page instruction sheet on how a recovery books, and a plain-English note you can forward to a client without endorsing anything.

No lock-in, no exclusivity, no minimum. We don't ask for your client list and we don't contact anyone you haven't introduced.

Ask for an estimateStart a conversation

We reply from a person, usually same day.

We use this only to reply. No newsletter, no list, no third parties, and we never contact your broker, forwarder or clients.

Free · public · no email required

The Australian Terminal Charge Register.

Every landside and ancillary charge published by Patrick Terminals and DP World Australia, at every port, with its effective date and a link to the operator's own notice. We keep it current because we need it — you may as well have it too.

Why this is free: these are published numbers. Charging for them would be charging you for arithmetic you're entitled to do yourself. What we sell is finding the errors across four years of paperwork, not knowing what a wharf gate fee costs.
Import landside charge, per full container · effective 1 January 2026 · excludes GSTRate table v1
Terminal20252026
Patrick — Port Botany, Sydney208.20224.90
DP World — Port Botany, Sydney225.51
Patrick — East Swanson Dock, Melbourne224.05242.00
Patrick — Fisherman Islands, Brisbane225.45243.50
Patrick — Fremantle91.5596.13
Storage per day, after free time
Basis20ft40ft
Patrick — per TEU, from day 1255.60511.20
DP World Sydney — days 1–2287.02574.05
DP World Sydney — day 3 onward569.061,138.11
DP World — hazardous, additional1,230.971,230.97
The fees people query most
ChargePatrickDP World
Booking (VBS), electronic50.4562.32
Booking, by phone or manual62.4074.58
Stack or bulk run30.9562.32
No-show283.95401.77
Weight amendment303.75303.18
Side loader84.20115.45
Yard handling (40ft)190.75419.48

Sources: Patrick Terminals final notice, 2 December 2025 · DP World Australia Sydney final confirmation, 28 November 2025. Both published under the National Voluntary Guidelines, both effective 1 January 2026, both exclusive of GST. Fremantle booking fees differ ($59.80 / $74.00). Patrick storage is charged per TEU, so a 40ft container counts as two. DP World's first free storage day begins when the container is made available through 1-Stop, and weekends count as free days. Re-verified each January, when the operators publish.

Found a charge that isn't in this table?

Tell us what it was called and we'll tell you what it is — and add it to the register. New fee names are how charges reappear after they've been queried, so we genuinely want to know.

The pilot · ten files, then we publish what we found

We're taking ten. Here's who, and who we turned away.

We are new. The honest way to prove any of this is to do it in the open on a small number of files and publish the result — including if the result is bad.

SEAT 1–10Open. Four-year audit at no cost for the first files, in exchange for permission to publish the anonymised numbers.taking enquiries
DECLINEDAn importer buying on delivered terms (DDP). Where the supplier's agent is the importer of record, our client has no standing to claim a refund — the entitlement sits with whoever is named on the declaration. We told them that rather than take the engagement.no standing
DECLINEDA New Zealand–only importer. Duty on NZ-origin goods is already nil under the trans-Tasman agreement. There was nothing to recover, and we said so.nothing to find

Those two disqualifiers are the most common reasons a duty audit finds nothing. If either describes you, you have just saved yourself a phone call — and that is the point of publishing them.

Registered in advance

On 15 December 2026, on this page, we will publish:

How many four-year files we reviewed
How many found nothing at all
The median recovery, and the full range
Our actual Border Force turnaround, against their 30-day standard
What we charged, and what clients kept

Including if the answer is bad. We are writing this down now, before we have the data, so that it cannot be quietly reshaped afterwards — which is the only thing that makes a claim like this worth anything.

One email, in December, containing the results. Not a newsletter. Unsubscribe in the same email.

Verify us

You were right to check.

An unsolicited letter about government money is exactly what a scam looks like. So don't take our word for any of it — here's how to check, and what a scam would never tell you.

Who is Salvor?

Salvor is a trading name of Nexa AI Pty Ltd, an Australian company. ABN [TO INSERT] — look it up yourself on ABN Lookup and on the ASIC registers, typing the address in yourself rather than following a link we sent. Our ABN and registered office appear on every letter and invoice we issue; if a document claiming to be from us doesn't carry them, it isn't from us.

Will you ever ask for bank details or a payment?

No. Never. Refunds are paid by the Australian Border Force by EFT directly into the client's own account. We never receive, hold or direct anyone's money, and we never ask for account details. Our fee is invoiced after the money has landed. If anyone claiming to be us asks for a payment up front, or to change bank details, it isn't us.

How do you get the import history without the broker?

The importer signs a one-page authority letter — the government's own template — and the Border Force sends the declaration history directly. The broker isn't involved and doesn't need to be told.

Does anyone have to leave their customs broker?

No. Keep the broker. Brokers clear entries in minutes for a fee measured in tens of dollars; a systematic four-year review of trade-agreement paperwork is not what anyone pays them to do. Finding something is nobody's failure — it's the arithmetic of how the industry works.

Could claiming a refund trigger an audit?

Refund applications are routine — roughly 95,000 are lodged each year and the overwhelming majority are approved. The real risk isn't claiming; it's claiming over a problem nobody knew about. That's why we screen both directions first and disclose anything owing before we lodge anything at all.

Where do your numbers come from?

Published sources with effective dates. Terminal charges come from the operators' own notices under the National Voluntary Guidelines: Patrick Terminals and DP World Australia, both effective 1 January 2026, both exclusive of GST. Duty rates come from the Working Tariff, the tariff concession register and the trade agreement schedules. Our rate table is dated and versioned — v1, compiled 6 August 2026.

Are the calculators on this page accurate?

They are exact for what they check and silent about what they can't. They compare an invoice to published price lists and to arithmetic on the invoice itself. They cannot see a rate agreement, the declarations, or the certificates of origin — so a clean result means "nothing wrong on the published charges", not "nothing wrong". Every figure is shown with the rate it was checked against, so it can be verified independently.

What does this site know about me?

Everything you calculate here happens on your own computer. Your invoice is opened by your browser and never sent anywhere — and you don't have to take our word for it. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, and run a check. Nothing leaves.

The only thing that reaches us is what you type into the form below and press send on.

We do count things, and we would rather tell you exactly what. When a section of this page is read, or one of the calculators is used, we add one to a counter — the day, and what happened. That is the whole record: 2026-08-07 · tool · container-hire-clock · 14. There is no cookie, no session, no identifier, nothing that could be joined back to you or to a visit, and no third party involved — the counter is ours and runs on our own server. We are a new business trying to learn which parts of this are useful, and counting is how. It never touches your figures, your invoice or anything you type.

Beyond that, our web server sees what every web server sees: that a request arrived, from which country, on which browser. That is how the internet works rather than a choice we made, and we run no analytics over it.

Two files are fetched from outside this site, and we would rather tell you than have you find them. The typefaces come from Google Fonts. And if — only if — you choose to read a PDF invoice, the page then fetches an open-source PDF reader from a public code library, because we are not going to ask you to trust a home-made one with your document. Neither fetch sends your invoice, your figures or your identity anywhere; both are visible in that same Network tab.

This entire site is one HTML file. Press Ctrl+U (or Cmd+U) and read it — including every calculation on this page.

What are the referral arrangements, precisely?

A share of our fee, disclosed to the client in dollars before they engage, documented in a short referral agreement, and payable only on money actually recovered. It's structured to sit inside your existing engagement terms and your professional disclosure obligations — and you can waive it to the client instead. We'll send the drafted paragraph before you commit to anything.

Does this create risk for my practice?

The work is customs duty, which sits with the Border Force rather than the Commissioner — outside the BAS and tax agent regime entirely. You aren't providing the advice; we are, and the client lodges. Because we screen for underpayments before lodging anything, an introduction from you doesn't create an exposure you'd have to explain later.

Do you work with larger importers?

Yes. The engine is the same at any size; what changes is the scale of what it finds and the governance around it — multiple entities, consolidated reporting, evidence packs formatted for internal audit, and a documented methodology a finance team can review before anything is lodged.

Concept — no cure, no pay