Before you can ship your goods to your international customers, you need to create export documents to ensure your goods arrive on time, you get paid the full amount, and you comply with export and import regulations. A typical export shipment can require five or more forms: a commercial invoice, a packing list, a shipper’s letter of instruction, a bill of lading and a certificate of origin.
If you’re not sure what you’re doing, creating your export paperwork can be a frustrating and time-consuming process. That’s why I published 5 Time-Saving Tips for Creating Accurate Export Documents. But your work doesn’t stop once you’ve handed off your paperwork along with your goods to your freight forwarder or carrier. You are responsible for maintaining copies of your export paperwork and much of the related documentation for five or 10 years, or even longer.
Here are five tips for organizing your export documents:
1. Save Your Work: Maintain Complete Records of Your Export Shipments
The most important thing exporters can do post-shipment is to keep a thorough paper trail of all exports. As a general rule, export regulations require you to maintain export documentation for at least five years after an export transaction is complete. If your export falls under the jurisdiction of the Office of Foreign Asset Controls (OFAC) regulations, the recordkeeping requirement was updated in 2025 to 10 years. This includes:
- Printed copies of your export documents, including the invoice, packing list, bill of lading, country of origin certificate, accounts payable and receivable, and purchase orders and sales records. (You can download these and many other free export forms here.)
- All records of your export compliance screenings. These should be saved in case your company is audited. Shipping Solutions Restricted Party Screening Software automatically saves your screening results. (If you need more information about your export compliance responsibilities, download our free guide.)
- Comprehensive notes explaining why you (or your employees) made the decisions you made. For example, let’s say you screened your export customer’s name and address against the various restricted party lists, and you came back with partial matches. After reviewing those potential matches, you made the decision it was okay to proceed with the shipment. You should document and save the reasons why you decided it was okay to ship to this company. In some situations, demonstrating that you’re thinking proactively about compliance and legal regulations, keeping accurate records, and doing your due diligence throughout the process may be more important than being 100% correct in your outcome.
- Handwritten notes should also be filed with their corresponding shipment records.
- An archive of emails related to particular shipments. It is best to print these and file them, but if you can’t print every email, at least save them in multiple locations (on an external hard drive, in your email archives, etc.)
As a rule, paper copies work better than electronic ones. All handwritten notations must be saved and stored with corresponding files. We recommend printing hard copies of every file, note and document associated with your shipments, but if you can’t, you must at least scan your paperwork and keep an electronic file.
2. Keep Your Records Accessible
A thorough archive of your export documentation won’t do you any good if it’s located in a storage unit 500 miles away when an auditor or regulator comes to your office and demands to see your files on the spot.
Make it an urgent and important task at your next meeting to discuss with your colleagues both how you’re going to store your export documentation and where it will be kept in your office. Keep in mind that your records need to be secure, easily accessible, and at least three people within your company need to be able to find them in a moment’s notice. (Should the Office of Export Enforcement come knocking on your door, at least you won’t have to worry about where to find your documents).
3. Monitor the Activities of Your International Sales Team
One key practice that can keep your company on the safe side of export compliance is to understand clearly what communication your sales team has with foreign entities and government officials. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits bribes to foreign officials to assist in obtaining or retaining business. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange (SEC) website:
The FCPA can apply to prohibited conduct anywhere in the world and extends to publicly traded companies and their officers, directors, employees, stockholders, and agents. Agents can include third party agents, consultants, distributors, joint-venture partners, and others.
The FCPA also requires issuers to maintain accurate books and records and have a system of internal controls sufficient to, among other things, provide reasonable assurances that transactions are executed and assets are accessed and accounted for in accordance with management’s authorization.
While the Trump Administration announced in 2025 that it was deemphasizing enforcement of the FCPA, the regulations are still on the books, and future administrations may make enforcement of these regulations a priority again. By managing what your sales team is saying to foreign customers or potential customers, you can make sure your entire organization doesn’t face legal action.
4. Identify Who’s In Charge of Your Export Documents
Whose job is it to organize your export documentation, and how will it be done? The answers depend on the size of your organization as well as your current administrative organization chart, to name a few things. Here are some recommendations for identifying who should administer your export documentation organization efforts:
- You’ll find several excellent tips for organizing your documents in the article, What to Include In Your Company’s Import-Export Compliance Procedures Manual.
- If you have a large enough organization, you may need (or want) to have an employee whose only job is to regulate compliance. The compliance officer may also belong to a legal department that maintains these kinds of records.
- Your compliance personnel should consist primarily of one person who’s collecting the data and required documents that need to be stored (the daily tasks), but multiple other people should know the procedures and what’s required.
5. Audit Your Export Compliance Efforts
Sometimes, the best way to see what’s working and what needs improvement within your organization is to bring in an unbiased, clear-eyed third party to do an audit. If you don’t have an organization plan, a third-party auditor or consultant can help you create a streamlined set of procedures and process for storing them.
If you already have a plan, an auditor can review it and make sure the processes are as they should be. They can also give you insight about issues you are missing or may not know about. A helpful auditor will also be able to provide shortcuts you don’t know about; conversely, they may show you that the shortcuts your organization has enacted over time are creeping dangerously close toward non-compliance.
Creating an Export Compliance Program
These five time-saving tips can not only help you save time organizing your export documents, they can help your company stay compliant with export regulations. That’s why documenting these steps in a written manual can help ensure that your company follows these procedures.
The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) calls this plan an Export Compliance Program (ECP) and encourages all exporters to create such a plan and document that it’s being followed for every export shipment. While there’s no legal requirement to do so, having an ECP plan in place—and documenting that it’s being followed—is a strong mitigating factor against penalties that can surpass $34,000 per violation.
The Shipping Solutions Professional export documentation and compliance software can help you more efficiently create your export documents, meet your export compliance responsibilities such as restricted party screening and export license determinations, and document that you are complying with the regulations and your own ECP. If you’d like to see how Shipping Solutions software can help your company organize your export paperwork, register now for a free online demo. There’s no obligation.
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