Certificate of Origin Generator

The problem this kills

Certificates of Origin and free-trade declarations are still typed by hand into Word templates or fillable PDFs - order by order, line by line. The origin of each product lives in someone's head or a spreadsheet. Whether a product actually qualifies for USMCA, EUR.1, or another free-trade agreement is a judgment call that gets made under time pressure at the loading dock.

That is a slow, error-prone process attached to a legally significant claim. Get an FTA qualification wrong and you are looking at denied preferential duty, penalties, retroactive duty bills, and a customs audit that asks for evidence you never kept. Get a country of origin wrong and the certificate is simply false.

The fix is not "type faster." It is to pull the origin and qualification data you already have, draft the certificate automatically, force a compliance person to review and approve the origin claim before anything is issued, and keep the evidence forever.

What you'll build

An internal web app for your export compliance and shipping team:

• Pick an order. Choose a shipment, and the app pulls each line's product, country of origin, and free-trade-agreement qualification flag.
• Auto-draft the certificate. The app assembles a draft Certificate of Origin or FTA declaration (USMCA, EUR.1, or your generic CO) from that data - exporter, importer, descriptions, HS codes, origin criteria, blanket-period dates.
• Compliance reviews and approves. Before anything is issued, a compliance reviewer checks every origin claim - especially each FTA qualification - and either approves or kicks it back with notes. Nothing is issued without a human "approve."
• Issue a signed PDF + record. On approval, the app stamps a Certificate of Origin number, generates the final PDF, stores it, emails it, and locks an immutable record of who approved what and when.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• It interviews you first. The plan's very first move is to interview you about your business - which agreements you use, how your products and HS codes are named, who reviews origin claims, your blanket-period rules, and your messy edge cases - then it tailors the data model, the qualification logic, and every build step to your answers. You are not getting a generic template.
• A step-by-step build you paste into Claude Code one prompt at a time.
• The full data model: products with origin and FTA status, orders and lines, certificates, and an approval/audit log.
• The compliance review queue and the hard human approval gate.
• Signed-PDF generation with a unique, deduplicated Certificate of Origin number.
• The "No API yet?" fallback: import your origin data from a Google Sheet or CSV today, and export issued certificates as a clean CSV - no integration required to get started.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own products, orders, and certificates.
• A complete audit trail - who drafted, who reviewed, who approved, and exactly when, with the data as it stood at approval.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate before any certificate is issued. The AI drafts; compliance reviews and approves the origin claim and FTA qualification; only then does the certificate get a number and a PDF. This is mandatory and the evidence is retained.
• Duplicate guards so the same order can't quietly produce two live certificates - the Certificate of Origin number is the dedupe key.

Who it's for

Export compliance managers, trade/customs admins, and shipping coordinators who issue Certificates of Origin and free-trade declarations and are tired of hand-typing them - and nervous about the qualification calls hidden inside each one.

You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.