Customs declaration OCR API that reads every item, HS code to duty

A customs declaration is the official statement filed with customs authorities to declare goods being imported or exported. It is submitted by the importer, the exporter or a customs broker on their behalf, and it includes the parties involved, the description and HS code of each item, the quantities, the customs value, the country of origin, the customs procedure and the duties and taxes due. Depending on the country, it is filed electronically or on official forms, such as the Single Administrative Document in the EU or CBP Form 7501 in the US. Mindee extracts the data from customs declarations and returns it as structured JSON, ready for your ERP, compliance or accounting systems.

An import declaration is filed when goods enter a country: it determines the duties and taxes to pay and allows the goods to be released. An export declaration is filed by the exporter, or their representative, before the goods leave the country. It records the shipment for customs control and trade statistics, and serves as proof of export, which is often needed to apply zero-rated VAT. When a shipment’s tracking shows “export customs declaration completed”, it means the goods have been cleared for export. Mindee processes both types of declarations and identifies which one it is.

These are key US import documents filed with Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The Importer Security Filing (ISF, or “10+2”) must be submitted for ocean shipments before the goods are loaded on the vessel. CBP Form 3461 is used to request the release of goods at the port. CBP Form 7501, the Entry Summary, details the classification, value, duties and fees for each item, and is the main record of what the importer declared and paid. Mindee extracts the data from these forms, including line-level classification and duty details, so importers and brokers can use it without manual data entry.

Customs declarations contain the duties, taxes and classifications you actually paid, and this data is valuable long after the goods are released. Importers use it to calculate the landed cost of products, reconcile duties and import VAT with their broker’s invoices, recover import VAT, claim duty refunds or drawback, and prepare for customs audits. Since declarations often come from several brokers in different formats, this data is usually scattered across PDFs. Mindee turns each declaration into structured data, so finance and compliance teams can analyze all their imports in one place.

Yes, your data is highly secured and protected during the entire conversion process. As an enterprise-grade OCR solution, Mindee takes data privacy very seriously. Here are the key security measures in place:

• Certified compliance: Mindee's infrastructure is SOC 2 Type II certified and fully GDPR compliant, ensuring strict industry standards for data protection.
• Encryption: All documents and extracted data are fully encrypted both in transit (during the API call) and at rest.
• Data localization: You have control over where your data is processed, with the option to host and process your data on either EU or US servers.
• Strict privacy: Mindee respects data confidentiality. Your processed documents are not shared with third parties, and your private data is not used to train global AI models.

In short, your sensitive documents are processed in a secure, isolated environment and remain completely under your control.

We provide a 14 days free trial so you can fully test any of our OCR models — no credit card required. After this, we offer different pricing tiers depending of the volume of pages processed and the features you might need. See the pricing page for more information.

The supported document formats are:

• PDF (application/pdf) – While technically a document format rather than an image, it is natively supported for all extraction models.
• JPEG / JPG (image/jpeg)
• PNG (image/png) – Must be non-animated.
• WebP (image/webp)
• TIFF / TIF (image/tiff) – Both single-page and multi-page TIFFs are supported and processed similarly to PDFs.
• HEIC (image/heic) – Apple's High-Efficiency Image Container format.

‍

📌 Important technical limitations to keep in mind:

To ensure the OCR pipeline runs smoothly and successfully returns your JSON, make sure your files adhere to the following constraints:

• Maximum file size: 100 MB per file.
• Maximum page count: Up to 200 pages per document.
• File state: The files cannot be encrypted, and PDFs must not be password-protected.