HS/HTS Classification Helper

The problem this kills

HS/HTS classification is one of those jobs where being a little bit wrong is expensive. Two people classify the same product two different ways. Someone reuses a code from a half-remembered shipment. A description gets eyeballed at 4:55pm on a Friday and a 6-digit code becomes a customs question six months later. The codes drift, the rationale lives in someone's head, and when a broker or a customs officer asks "why this code?" nobody can answer with confidence.

The painful part is that you already have the knowledge. You have a reference table. You have years of past classifications that were done correctly. That institutional memory just isn't searchable, and it isn't being used to keep new classifications consistent with old ones.

This tool turns your reference table and your classification history into a fast, consistent assistant - while keeping a qualified human firmly in charge of every code that gets saved.

What you'll build

A small, secure web app for your trade-compliance team:

• You type or paste a product description (and a SKU if you have one).
• The tool searches your HS/HTS reference table and your past approved classifications and proposes a short list of ranked candidate codes, each with a plain-language reason and a confidence note.
• A qualified specialist reviews the candidates, picks (or overrides) one, and writes the rationale.
• Only after that human approval is the classification saved to your classification database - with the SKU, the chosen code, the rationale, who approved it, and when.
• Next time a similar product comes in, your own approved history makes the suggestion even better.

It is fully buildable today even if you have no API into your ERP or customs system: your reference CSV is the source, and the tool produces a clean CSV export in exactly the columns your system of record expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The plan is a single file you paste into an AI coding agent (Claude Code). It walks the agent through building the whole tool, step by step, with a ready-to-copy prompt at the end of each step.

Crucially, the plan opens by interviewing you about your business - your current classification process, the exact shape of your reference table, how your SKUs are named, your typical and peak volumes, who is allowed to approve, and your messy edge cases (sets, parts, kits, country-specific suffixes). It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, and only then starts building. You get a tool shaped around how you actually classify, not a generic template.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Classification is legally significant, so governance isn't a nice-to-have here - it's the whole reason to build it properly:

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own data.
• A mandatory human approval gate - the AI only ever drafts candidate codes; nothing is saved as an official classification until a qualified person reviews and approves it.
• A retained rationale on every approved code - the "why this code" is captured and kept, not lost.
• A complete audit trail - who suggested, who approved, what was overridden, and when.
• Duplicate guards keyed on product/SKU so the same item can't be quietly classified twice in conflicting ways.

Who it's for

Trade compliance and import/export specialists who own HS/HTS classification - and the brokers and ops teams who depend on those codes being consistent and defensible. If you can describe your process in plain English, you can build this.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the rest.