Field notes
What a broker change does to last year’s charts
Traders change brokers for ordinary reasons: rates, a missed clearance, a group mandate. The customs year does not reset when the contract does. If you want a twelve-month view of duty and commodity mix, you will likely hold two export formats, two sets of reference numbers, and two opinions about which column is “country of origin”.
We treat a broker change as a seam in the pack, not as a reason to throw the first agent’s year away. The covering note says where the seam sits. Charts that cannot be joined — because one file lacks a field the other has — stay as two pictures rather than a blended invention.
A handover pack for the incoming agent is a different document. It summarises lanes and habits; it does not pretend the old extracts were built for your new charts. Mixing those jobs produces a file that is too vague for the agent and too rough for the audit file.
If you are mid-change, send both extracts and say which month the new agent began lodging. We would rather print a seam than a smooth line that no declaration supports.