The customs control tower watching while you sell
A structured monthly retainer for companies that import regularly and want to keep the hand without carrying the load. Document review, regulatory watch, coordination, structured archive.
The right time to shift to recurring mode
A monthly retainer is not for everyone. It makes full sense once you meet at least two of the following conditions.
Your imports fall into multiple regulatory streams — classic customs plus CBAM, plus EUDR or product compliance
You work with several brokers or forwarders and no one holds the full picture. You have already had a customs incident (reassessment, block, audit) and you never want to live through that again.
You import regularly — not once a quarter, but at least a few shipments per month.
You are preparing growth (new markets, new suppliers, new products) and you know complexity will only rise.
In those situations, a one-shot Diagnostic is no longer enough: you need a continuous, light but constant presence. That is exactly the role of the Control Tower Retainer.
What is included each month
Our retainer runs on six structured deliverables that come back every month. You know exactly what you buy and what you receive.
📦 Document review of the month's imports
We take all your import declarations of the past month, check HS codes, origins, values and Incoterms, and flag anomalies. You receive a synthetic report: what is solid, what needs correction, what deserves deeper analysis.
🌍 Targeted regulatory watch on your activity
Not a generic newsletter: a monthly bulletin containing only what concerns your sectors, your origins, your products. New trade agreements, CBAM and EUDR evolutions, sanctions, TARIC changes, Belgian and European customs case law. What you need to know — and only that.
👤 Expert availability on call
An urgent question on a live import, a supplier sending you a doubtful document, a broker proposing an ambiguous classification: you write or call us. We answer within a defined timeframe (24 or 48 hours depending on the retainer level). No per-unit billing, no meter running.
⛔ Coordination with your brokers and forwarders
When a file gets stuck between your supplier, your forwarder and your broker, we step in to unblock it. We speak their technical language, we keep a trace of the exchanges, and we feed the lessons back to prevent recurrence.
📊 Quarterly dashboard
Every three months, a visual synthesis of your flows: volumes by origin, by HS code, by Incoterm, duties paid, anomalies handled, savings made, risks identified. You see your customs activity the way you see your accounting.
🗂️ Audit-ready structured archive
Everything that goes through the retainer is archived in an evidentiary logic: declarations, source documents, exchanges, decisions taken. If a post-clearance check happens one, two or three years later, the file is immediately available and defensible.
What a month concretely looks like
Week 2. You receive the review report: 2 to 4 pages, ranked as “solid / to fix / to investigate”. If an urgent correction comes up, we call you right away.
Week 3. You receive the targeted regulatory watch bulletin — typically 5 to 10 points, never more.
All month long, your questions arrive by email or call and receive an argued answer within the contractual delay. Every three months, you receive the quarterly dashboard and we hold a 45-minute video checkpoint to review what was handled, what is coming, and what should be adjusted.
Indicators and deliverables
A steering set-up is only worth what it makes visible. Every month, you know where you stand without having to ask.
- Monthly dashboard: volumes declared by origin and by regime, gaps identified, incidents opened and closed.
- Anomaly register: every gap documented, its cause, the corrective action and its status.
- Document hotline: an answer to your classification, origin or value questions before the file goes out.
- Targeted regulatory watch: only the changes that affect your flows, not a press review.
- Quarterly review: trends, recurring friction points and priorities for the coming quarter.
Choose the intensity, not the duration
The retainer comes in three levels. All are monthly subscriptions, no long-term commitment: you stop with 30 days' notice. Loyalty is not earned by contract, it is earned by delivered value.
Enhanced steering
Supervision
Steering
For companies with a regular but homogeneous import flow. Monthly document review, targeted regulatory watch, email availability within 48 hours, structured archive. Half-yearly dashboard. Ideal entry level..
For companies with more complex or growing flows. Everything in Supervision, plus: call availability within 24 hours, active coordination with your brokers, quarterly dashboard, quarterly video checkpoint. Most subscribed level.
For companies facing higher exposure (an ongoing audit, a CBAM ramp-up, a customs system transition, strong growth on sensitive markets). Everything in Steering, plus: a weekly review of at-risk files, a direct line to your lead consultant, a monthly video call, and reinforced support in the event of a post-clearance audit.
Support sized to your volume
The right starting point is not a sales call — it is a Diagnostic. In a scoped 5 to 10-day engagement, we analyse one of your representative imports and hand you three actionable deliverables. At the end, we know together whether a retainer makes sense, and if yes, at which level. That is the only honest way to propose a subscription: based on real data, not a promise.
Governance and responsibilities
Clear steering requires everyone to know what they carry. We put it in writing from the start.
- You remain the principal: declarative responsibility and master data belong to you.
- Your customs declarant and freight forwarder keep their role: we do not replace them, we coordinate them.
- CTB Group handles preparation, verification and coordination, and files no declaration on your behalf.
- One single contact on the CTB Group side, one identified referent on yours, and a defined escalation path for urgent cases.
- The accuracy of the data supplied by your suppliers is theirs: we flag inconsistencies, we do not guarantee them.
Key questions answered
Dans cette section, vous pouvez répondre efficacement aux questions les plus fréquentes.
No — we work alongside them. Your broker continues to sign declarations. We steer documentary quality upstream and coordination downstream. Many of our clients keep their long-standing broker for years — we even make that relationship easier.
Most of our clients see a drop in customs incidents from month 2 and significant time savings for their teams from month 3. The ROI fully materialises between months 4 and 6.
Yes — it's actually an excellent foundation. The Control Tower documents your flows and your internal controls, which is exactly what the AEO procedure requires. Several of our clients use their Control Tower track record as a reference file for their AEO application.
