Extract data from import and export licenses

Some goods cannot cross a border on a commercial invoice alone. Controlled items, dual-use technology, chemicals, defence-related parts, need a licence from a government authority before they ship, and that licence is a document with a life of its own: a number, an issue date, an expiry date, a status, and a defined scope of goods, parties, and destinations it permits. An exporter, a freight forwarder, and a customs broker all check it before booking, because shipping outside the licence's terms stops the consignment. What a licence authorises is narrow and coded. It names the exporter and the consignee with their EORI identifiers, fixes the country of dispatch and the country of destination, and lists the goods by Combined Nomenclature code, sometimes with a CUS number for a regulated chemical substance. A dual-use item references the EU control-list entry it falls under. The validity window matters as much as the scope: a licence issued 2026-06-15 and expiring 2027-06-14 covers shipments only inside that range, and the declared value in one ISO 4217 currency and the net mass bound what may move under it. Talonic reads the licence and returns its identifiers, parties, goods, and validity as structured fields. An export licence issued to Teltow Präzisionselektronik GmbH, consignee Meridian Controls Pte Ltd in Singapore, from the German authority BAFA and numbered BAFA-EX-2026-114879, covering programmable logic controllers bound for destination code SG under commodity code 8542.31.90 with a CUS number, returns the exporter and consignee EORI numbers, the 85,000 EUR declared value, and the expiry date, so a forwarder confirms scope before the goods leave.

What gets extracted from import and export licenses

How extraction works for import and export licenses

Import and export licences are issued by trade-control authorities and arrive as authority PDFs, portal exports, and scans, structured on the EU Customs Data Model but laid out per authority. Talonic classifies the licence and binds it to the customs schema in the Field Registry, which holds the licence number, the issue and expiry dates, the declaration type, the parties with their EORI numbers, the issuing authority, and the status as discrete fields. Goods are captured per item with a Combined Nomenclature code, a country of origin, and a CUS number where a chemical is listed, and the declared value and net mass are typed for reconciliation against the shipment. The validity window is parsed to ISO 8601 so an expired licence is obvious at a glance. Field-level confidence and pixel-region provenance follow DIN SPEC 91491, letting a compliance officer verify scope against the source. The extraction structures the licence and does not determine whether a shipment is licensable.

Sample extraction

A dual-use export licence for controlled electronics

{
  "document_number": "BAFA-EX-2026-114879",
  "document_date": "2026-06-15",
  "expiration_date": "2027-06-14",
  "declaration_type": "EX",
  "exporter": "Teltow Präzisionselektronik GmbH, Teltow, DE",
  "exporter_identification_no": "DE9876543210987",
  "consignee": "Meridian Controls Pte Ltd, Singapore",
  "importer_identification_no": "SG-UEN-201812345K",
  "issuing_authority": "Bundesamt für Wirtschaft und Ausfuhrkontrolle (BAFA)",
  "license_status": "valid",
  "incoterms": "FCA Hamburg",
  "commodity_code": "8542.31.90",
  "country_of_origin": "DE",
  "country_of_dispatch_export": "DE",
  "country_of_destination": "SG",
  "declared_value": 85000,
  "currency": "EUR",
  "net_mass": 320,
  "cus_code": "0042831-6",
  "goods_items": [
    {
      "commodity_code": "8542.31.90",
      "product_description": "Programmable logic controllers, dual-use listed",
      "country_of_origin": "DE",
      "cus_code": "0042831-6",
      "valuation_method": "transaction value",
      "declared_value": 85000,
      "currency": "EUR",
      "net_mass": 320,
      "number_of_packages": 8
    }
  ]
}

Frequently asked