A trading business that both imports and exports carries two distinct admin problems most single-direction guides only address half of. On the import side, landed cost calculations, duty, freight, insurance, currency conversion, all layered onto a supplier's unit price, have to be accurate before a margin decision can be made. On the export side, a different set of documents, commercial invoices, certificates of origin, letters of credit conditions, has to be prepared correctly or a shipment sits at a foreign port while paperwork gets fixed. Most existing guidance covers one direction well and leaves the other as an afterthought.
This is the specific gap this guide fills: a two-way trader running both sides of the business needs a workflow for each direction, and treating them as one generic problem tends to produce a tool that does neither well.
The import side: landed cost
Calculating a true landed cost, a supplier's FOB price plus freight, insurance, duty, and any local charges, converted at the actual exchange rate on the day of the transaction, is a task Claude handles well when fed the underlying figures. The output is a worksheet a buyer can trust before committing to a purchase order, not a guess based on last quarter's rough exchange rate.
Landed cost worksheets: converting supplier invoices, freight quotes, and duty rates into a per-unit landed cost figure ready for a pricing decision.
Export documentation: drafting commercial invoices, packing lists, and certificate of origin applications from a confirmed order's shipping details.
Letter of credit compliance checks: cross-referencing a draft set of export documents against an LC's stated conditions before submission to the bank.
Supplier and buyer correspondence: drafting price negotiations, shipment confirmations, and delay notifications in both directions of the trade relationship.
A worked example: a Sydney two-way trader
A Sydney-based trading business importing specialty food ingredients and exporting Australian nutraceutical products found landed cost recalculation, needed every time a supplier adjusted pricing or the exchange rate moved meaningfully, took close to three hours a week to update across roughly 40 active product lines. A Claude Cowork workflow fed current supplier pricing and daily exchange rates now regenerates the full landed cost worksheet in under twenty minutes, with the operations manager checking the figures before they feed into pricing decisions. On the export side, the same business cut commercial invoice and certificate of origin drafting time from around 25 minutes per shipment to under eight, across roughly 15 export shipments a month. Combined, the two workflows recover close to 10 hours a month, worth an estimated $700 at the operations manager's rate.
Where the export side needs its own attention
Export documentation carries its own risk profile distinct from import landed costs: a mismatch between a letter of credit's stated conditions and the actual shipping documents submitted can delay payment or trigger a bank rejection, a genuinely costly outcome for an exporter waiting on that payment. Claude's role here is a first-pass cross-check, comparing drafted documents against the LC's conditions and flagging discrepancies for the export coordinator to resolve before submission, not a substitute for the coordinator's own final review or the bank's compliance check.
Why this business needs both, not one or the other
A business trading in only one direction can reasonably focus its AI workflow entirely on that direction's specific paperwork. A business trading both ways needs a workflow that handles the genuinely different document types and risk profiles on each side, landed cost maths for buying, LC and certificate compliance for selling, rather than treating the whole operation as a single generic 'trade admin' problem. Building the two workflows separately, even if they share some underlying supplier and shipment data, reflects how differently the two sides of the business actually operate.
Getting started on whichever side hurts more
A two-way trader does not need to solve both sides at once. The realistic starting point is whichever direction currently causes the most manual rework, landed cost recalculation for a business with volatile supplier pricing, or export documentation for a business managing several concurrent LC-backed shipments, tested against a month of real transactions before extending the pattern to the other side of the business.
Currency movement as its own ongoing task
Exchange rate movement is the variable most import-export businesses handle worst, either ignoring it between periodic manual updates or tracking it so loosely that landed cost figures drift out of date within days. A workflow that pulls a current exchange rate each time a landed cost worksheet regenerates keeps pricing decisions grounded in today's real cost rather than a rate that was accurate a fortnight ago. For a business trading in AUD against a volatile currency, that alone can be the difference between a quote that protects margin and one that quietly erodes it before the shipment even arrives.
