Landed Cost Software

Landed cost software calculates the total cost of getting a product from the supplier to your dock and expresses it per SKU. It starts from the product price and adds duty, trade remedies, freight, insurance, brokerage, the Merchandise Processing Fee and Harbor Maintenance Fee, and any destination tax, so the figure your margin depends on is complete rather than a product price with costs bolted on later. Captain builds this stack on the same commercial and freight data your entries and bookings use, calculates it before the purchase order is cut, and reconciles the estimate against actuals after the shipment lands, so the number stays accurate enough to price and plan margins against.

Customs duty software focuses on the duty side: classifying goods, applying tariff schedule rates and remedies, and flagging refunds. Landed cost software consumes that duty number and stacks the rest of the cost of import on top, freight, insurance, fees, and tax, so the output is a total per-unit cost rather than a duty figure. In Captain the two share one data set, so the duty engine feeds landed cost directly and you are not re-keying values between tools. If your question is what will this SKU actually cost me at the dock, landed cost software is the answer; if your question is how much duty do I owe and can I recover any, that is the duty engine feeding into it.

A tariff tracker monitors rate changes, new Section 301 actions, remedy updates, and HTS revisions, and alerts you when a rate that affects your goods moves. Landed cost software is where that rate lands: when the tracker flags a change, the cost stack on every affected SKU reprices automatically. The tracker answers did the rate change; the landed cost engine answers what that change does to my unit cost and my margin. They are complementary, and in Captain the tracker feeds the cost model so a rate move flows through to landed cost without anyone rebuilding a spreadsheet.

You define the variables that matter for a sourcing decision, origin country, freight mode, Incoterm, order quantity, and the platform builds a full landed cost for each combination and shows them side by side per unit. China at FOB by ocean versus Vietnam at DDP by air is no longer a mental estimate; it is two complete cost stacks with the delta broken out into duty, freight, and fees. Because each scenario runs on real duty rates and current freight, the comparison reflects what you would actually pay, so you can commit the purchase order to the option that protects margin rather than the one that looked cheapest on the supplier quote.

Freight, insurance, and accessorial charges usually arrive at the shipment or container level, not the line level, so the platform allocates them down to each SKU by a rule you choose, weight, volume, or commercial value, and captures surcharges and accessorials so nothing is dropped. A dense, low-value item and a light, high-value item in the same container get their true share rather than a flat average, which is what makes the per-unit cost accurate. For mixed containers and multi-line entries, the split runs automatically each time, so buyers see a defensible unit cost instead of a shipment total they have to divide by hand.

Because the estimate runs on the same commercial value, duty rates, and freight data that the customs entry and freight invoice will use, the gap between estimated and actual landed cost is small, typically within about a point once your data is clean. The platform then reconciles estimate against actual on every line and flags drift, so any systematic gap, a fee you were not modeling or a freight lane that runs hot, gets corrected rather than repeating. That feedback loop is what keeps the number trustworthy enough to set prices and margin floors against, instead of a rough estimate finance discounts because it has been burned before.

Yes. Incoterms decide which costs sit with the supplier and which land on you, so the platform models the buildup according to the term in play. Under FOB you carry freight, insurance, and import charges; under DDP the supplier has priced much of that in, so the landed cost is structured differently even for the same goods. Modeling the term explicitly stops the common error of double-counting freight the supplier already included or omitting duty on a term where you owe it. When you compare scenarios, changing the Incoterm is one of the variables, so you see how a shift from FOB to DDP actually changes your per-unit cost and risk.

Yes. Landed cost is only useful if it reaches the decisions it should drive, so the platform pushes the per-SKU number back to your system of record and into pricing, procurement, and reporting through the API. Buyers set margins against a real loaded cost, pricing teams check proposed prices against a landed-cost floor, and finance reports margin on the number goods actually cost rather than a product price. Currency and exchange-rate handling keeps multi-origin sourcing comparable in your reporting currency. The point is that the landed cost is not trapped in a costing screen; it is available wherever the business prices, buys, or reports.

Yes. The cost model draws its duty inputs from the platform's duty engine and rate monitoring, so when a tariff schedule rate, a Section 301 action, or an antidumping or countervailing duty order changes, the affected SKUs reprice automatically. This matters because a remedy change can move a unit cost by double digits overnight, and a landed cost that still reflects last quarter's rate will quietly misprice everything sourced from that origin. Keeping the duty layer live means the landed cost a buyer sees today reflects today's trade actions, which is exactly the moving target a static spreadsheet cannot keep up with.

Yes. The platform connects to your ERP, TMS, and commercial systems through structured API integration, so product values, origin, duty, and freight charges flow in automatically and landed cost flows back to your system of record. You do not replatform; the landed cost engine sits on top of the systems you already run and consumes the data they already hold. That two-way link is what keeps the estimate and the actual aligned, because both draw from the same source, and it is what lets landed cost feed pricing and procurement downstream instead of living as a number someone maintains by hand in a separate file.

A focused rollout can be live in two to three weeks: about a week to connect ERP and freight data, a few days to build the duty inputs, freight allocation rules, and fee and tax logic by lane, and a reconciliation window where estimated landed cost is checked against real entries and invoices before go-live. Programs with many origins, complex freight arrangements, or heavy accessorials take four to six weeks because the allocation rules are larger. We validate the model against your actual history before buyers price against it. The usual gate is not our setup, it is how clean and complete your product, value, and freight data is when we load it.