The bottom line
Now your practice can meet it. Powerful customs valuation optimization strategies, such as First Sale and non-dutiable charges, are more in demand than ever, but sizing the opportunity, building the documentation, and managing the implementation for these engagements takes enormous time and can be cost prohibitive.
LandedEdge surfaces the opportunities you'd never have time to find, then handles the implementation infrastructure, including the document work and the documentation trail, without ever replacing the professional judgment and expertise these strategies require.
Your team brings the analysis and owns the client relationship; the platform absorbs the grind. Take on more of these lucrative engagements and sell your clients the outcome.
Use the Screener to surface duty-savings opportunities across a client's entire portfolio.
Convert the strongest opportunities into First Sale and NDC engagements, where the Navigator automates most of the implementation work and lets you price with margins that make sense.
Then rerun the analysis each year as a compliance health check. A screen leads the way to bigger engagements, and the engagements become recurring revenue.
Step one: the Screener
The Screener finds and prioritizes opportunities at portfolio scale. Instead of hand-tracing the handful of entries a client already flagged, you scan their entire high-tariff book and walk in with a number.
For each importer client, upload a representative recent transaction: the 7501, commercial invoice, and shipping documents the importer already has on hand. The engine reads the documents and organizes entries into distinct supply chains, one per party chain.
The Screener analyzes each supply chain to determine whether a multi-tier pricing structure exists that could support a First Sale valuation. It cross-references hundreds of data points across your documents, builds a finding explaining why the structure appears to be there or not, and estimates the potential duty savings. The same analysis a consultant would spend hours on, delivered in minutes.
Each supply chain gets a likelihood read backed by the specific evidence driving that finding, paired with the potential ROI. The Screener output becomes your pitch to the importer: here is why pursuing First Sale or claiming certain NDCs for this supply chain may be worth it, here is what we found, and here is what it could save.
Two routes to lower landed costs
Both are established, legal valuation strategies. Both are widely valued and hard to apply at scale, because finding every potential opportunity to use them by hand simply isn't feasible across a full portfolio. Tap each to expand.
When an import transaction involves multiple sales before goods reach the US, customs law allows duties to be assessed on an earlier, lower price rather than the last sale price, provided the transaction meets the applicable First Sale requirements. For importers buying through trading companies or middlemen, the difference between what the factory charged and what the importer paid can represent significant duty savings.
The bottleneck has always been economics: tracing party chains by hand just to determine whether a two-tier pricing structure even exists means a trade professional can realistically review only a handful of supply chains per client. Most of that manual work produces dead ends you still have to bill for.
The Screener changes that math. Upload an importer's entry packets and get back a finding on every supply chain, the evidence behind it, and the potential ROI, so you know exactly which structures are worth pursuing for implementation.
Depending on the shipping terms and how charges are allocated, the declared customs value may include freight, insurance, port, and other charges that are legally deductible. Most importers never claim them because proving the breakdown means matching forwarder invoices, carrier bills, and broker records to specific entries.
The Screener surfaces these NDC opportunities from the same entry packet. It analyzes the transaction terms and shipping structure to identify which cost layers may be embedded in the declared value and flags them for the consultant.
The consultant sees which supply chains have deductible charges worth pursuing and can gauge whether the savings justify an NDC implementation alongside or instead of First Sale. Even when First Sale is a no-go on a given supply chain, NDC opportunities may still be there to claim.
Every supply chain gets two reads: one for First Sale, one for NDC
A read on whether a multi-tier pricing structure appears to be in place that could support a First Sale valuation worth implementing. One of four outcomes.
A read on whether deductible charges such as freight, insurance, and port costs may be embedded in the declared value and worth pursuing. One of four outcomes.
The Screener is the top of the funnel, and it can stand on its own: offer it as a fast, paid savings analysis, or as the front end of a full engagement. Either way, you decide which supply chains are worth taking into the implementation phase, where the Navigator automates most of the work.
Step two: the Navigator
The Navigator is the implementation engine, and it's where the leverage is for your practice. It runs 145+ deterministic checks across the four legal pillars of First Sale to diagnose exactly what needs attention on each judgmental sample being reviewed for implementation: where something has to change for the structure to hold up, where a finding calls for a trade professional's judgment, and where the file is still missing what it needs. Same inputs, consistent result, every time.
See the platform
How a trade professional works in LandedEdge: the Screener surfaces and prioritizes the opportunities, then the Navigator qualifies the strongest supply chains. The specific findings are blurred here; hover any box to see what it does.
1. The supply chains. Open a client and the Screener has already organized their data import into distinct supply chains, each with an early First Sale and NDC read.
2. The read on a supply chain. Behind every call is a traceable report: the party chain, the kind of signals that point toward First Sale or NDC opportunity, how the documents connect, and an estimate of the savings.
LandedEdge maps the parties behind each transaction, the kind of multi-tier structure that can open the door to First Sale. An early read on what the portfolio looks to contain.
A bill-of-lading shipper that differs from the invoice seller, the classic two-tier signal.
LandedEdge connects your shipping and transaction documents into one picture, enough for an early read on where First Sale looks likely, possible, or unlikely.
A directional read on what a supply chain could be worth, so you can prioritize where the savings actually are before spending billable hours.
International ocean freight billed within the entered value.
Estimate the savings. Adjust the inputs to size what First Sale could be worth on a single supply chain. Directional only, actual savings depend on confirmed factory pricing.
Directional estimate, First Sale savings only, for a single supply chain. Actual savings depend on confirmed factory pricing and entry-by-entry qualification by a trade professional.
3. The Navigator does the heavy lifting. Proceeding to the Navigator builds a document heatmap and runs 145+ deterministic checks across the four pillars of First Sale requirements. It keeps every document in one place and flags exactly what you have, what's missing, what the risks are, and the remediation steps.
| Document | Provided | Seller | Buyer | Value | Incoterm | BFS | CD |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 First Sale · Factory to Middleman | |||||||
INV1 Commercial invoice | Yes | Factory | Middleman | $142,000 | FOB | OK | Missing |
Payment 1 Wire confirmation | Yes | N/A | N/A | $142,000 | N/A | OK | N/A |
| 02 Second Sale · Middleman to Importer | |||||||
INV2 Commercial invoice | Yes | Middleman | Importer | $178,500 | CIF | OK | OK |
Payment 2 Wire confirmation | Missing | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 03 Entry & Logistics | |||||||
CF 7501 Entry summary | Yes | N/A | N/A | $178,500 | N/A | OK | OK |
HBOL House bill of lading | Yes | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | OK | OK |
One place to manage the mountain of documents a First Sale or NDC program demands. The Navigator keeps every document organized, shows what you have and what's still missing, and maps each one to the requirements, so nothing slips through across an entire portfolio.
Does the Payment 1 amount match the first sale invoice?
The platform reconciles the two amounts and shows you exactly where that evidence sits in the mountain of First Sale paperwork, keeps it organized, and tells you whether the amounts match or what the discrepancy is, so you can remedy and act.
Does the second sale purchase order include a US destination statement?
The platform checks whether the PO between the middleman and the importer explicitly states the goods are destined for the United States. If the destination is missing or ambiguous, it flags the exact document and tells you what needs to be added before the file is complete.
Are the factory and middleman related parties?
The platform surfaces whether a relationship exists between the parties in the supply chain through the offshore data interrogatories completed by the foreign parties. If a relationship is identified, it flags the finding so you know upfront whether arm's length pricing needs to be established before the structure can hold up.
Did the importer provide tooling, molds, or designs to the factory?
The platform cross-references responses from the offshore data interrogatories (questionnaires completed by the foreign parties in the supply chain), purchase orders, and invoices for any indication that the buyer supplied materials, engineering, or production tools. If assists are identified, they must be added to the transaction value, and the platform flags what was found so you can quantify and account for it.
The platform does the slow, expensive, and time-consuming verification work and shows you what's done, what's pending, and where your judgment is required, while you stay in control. Want to see it run on a live portfolio? Request a walkthrough.
A new model
CBP is more stringent than ever, and a First Sale program is not set-and-forget. A yearly health check confirms a program is still compliant, something that used to be prohibitively expensive to redo by hand. With the Navigator it reruns against current state automatically. A one-time project becomes an annual one.
Screen a client's whole portfolio in minutes and put a savings number in front of them. Offer the screen as a standalone paid analysis, or as the front end of an engagement. New pipeline, fast.
Convert the strongest opportunities into First Sale and NDC implementation work. Because the Navigator automates the time-consuming parts, you take on more clients and price the work with far more flexibility on your margins.
Rerun the Navigator each year as a compliance health check. Pull a recent sample entry, run it through the FS Navigator, and the engagement renews itself. Frozen records year over year, automatic rechecks, a complete traceable file every time. The engagement becomes recurring annual revenue.
Built by people who lived the problem
Founded by two attorneys who came from Big 4, LandedEdge is the First Sale and customs valuation platform they wished they had: AI-powered screening paired with a deterministic, rules-based analysis engine.
Now in pilot
We're pre-launch and onboarding a small number of design partners. Pick a few clients with meaningful high-tariff exposure, screen their portfolios, and bring each a savings number you can offer as a standalone, paid diagnosis.
Contact us