A UK customs broker turned its mailbox into a declarations pipeline
No engineering team, no integration project. Live the day after signup, serving 27 client companies from a single account.
- From mailbox connection to first value
- 15 minFrom mailbox connection to first valueThe first live declaration landed 4 minutes after connection
- Customer volume the same ops team can handle
- 3xCustomer volume the same ops team can handleThe brokerage's own assessment, not a figure we measured
- Client companies live on day one
- 27Client companies live on day oneFrom a single operator account, with no engineers
- Historical declarations migrated
- 500+Historical declarations migratedBack-catalogue loaded in one afternoon
- Customer
- UK customs brokerage
- Jurisdictions
- UK and EU
The challenge
A customs broker's work arrives as email.
Manifests, commercial invoices, packing lists, corrections, chasers — they land in a shared mailbox from dozens of different shippers, in whatever format that shipper happens to use. Someone opens each one, reads it, works out which of the brokerage's clients it belongs to, and retypes the contents into a declaration.
This brokerage had no engineering team. Not a small one, not an outsourced one — none. That is entirely normal for the trade, and it is exactly where most automation conversations die. Every vendor pitch ends at "and then your developers integrate with our API," which is a sentence with no meaning here.
So the requirement wasn't really "automate declarations." It was narrower and harder: turn the mailbox we already have into an API we don't have to build.
The solution
XB ClearanceFlow connected directly to the brokerage's existing Microsoft 365 mailbox. No forwarding rules to maintain, no new inbox for staff to learn, no change to how their shippers send documents.
From there it reads each inbound message, extracts the declaration data, and — the part that actually matters — works out which client it belongs to. That attribution is the unglamorous problem at the centre of brokerage automation: a document is worthless until it's filed against the right customer. ClearanceFlow resolves it from signals in the message itself, and the system learned 19 sender rules over the first fortnight as it saw more traffic.
Where attribution rests on a single piece of evidence, the declaration goes into a review queue for a human to confirm rather than being filed silently. The broker sees what the system inferred and why, and confirms or corrects it in one click.
Their historical declarations were loaded the same way, in bulk.
The results
The brokerage was live the morning after it signed up, and the first structured declaration landed four minutes after the mailbox was connected — no integration project, no developer, and no change to how documents arrive.
There was no per-client onboarding queue either. All 27 client companies were live on day one, 25 of them going on to receive declarations, the whole operation run from a single user account. The mailbox connection has run continuously since it was switched on.
The back-catalogue was its own afternoon's work: 500+ historical declarations, with filing dates reaching back months, loaded in around two hours.
Steady-state, the pipeline handles around 11 declarations a day, every one of them automatically attributed to a client.
The two outcomes the brokerage itself points to are not ones our database can see. The first is capacity: the same operations team now reckons it can carry roughly three times the customer volume it could before, because the work that scaled with headcount — opening mail, identifying the client, retyping the contents — no longer does.
The second is visibility, and it is about their customers rather than them. A broker's clients traditionally have no idea where a declaration is until someone answers the phone. Because every document now lands as a structured record the moment it arrives, the brokerage can show clients the state of their clearances directly. That was the gap its customers had complained about, and closing it turned out to matter more to them than the speed did.