Incoterms Advisor & Responsibility Matrix
A guided internal tool that recommends the right Incoterms 2020 rule for a shipment, shows the full buyer/seller responsibility matrix, and makes a coordinator approve it before it lands on the order or quote.
Sales and export coordinators answer a few scenario questions, get a recommended Incoterm plus a clear who-pays-what responsibility matrix, approve it, and save the term to the order with a summary PDF.
Before you start
- A free Supabase account
- A free Vercel account
- A free Resend account
- Claude Code installed on a Linux machine
The problem this kills
Picking the wrong Incoterm is one of the quietest, most expensive mistakes in export sales. Someone in inside sales quotes "FOB" on an air shipment (which isn't even allowed), or promises "DDP" without realizing your company just signed up to pay import duty in a country you've never cleared customs in. Months later it surfaces as a freight dispute, a surprise customs bill, or an argument about who eats the damaged-in-transit pallet.
The knowledge to avoid this usually lives in one or two experienced heads. Everyone else guesses, copies the last quote, or picks whatever sounds familiar. There's no guardrail, no record of why a term was chosen, and no consistent place where the buyer/seller split is spelled out before it becomes a contract.
This tool turns that tribal knowledge into a guided, repeatable, governed process - so the team stops choosing terms that cause disputes.
What you'll build
A small internal web app where a coordinator:
- Answers a short set of scenario questions - transport mode, who arranges the main carriage, where they want risk to transfer, who clears customs.
- Gets a recommended Incoterms 2020 rule with a plain-language explanation of why.
- Sees the full responsibility matrix: who pays freight, who buys insurance, who handles export and import customs, who pays duty, and the exact point where risk passes from seller to buyer.
- Reviews and approves the recommendation (a human gate - nothing is saved until a person signs off).
- Saves the approved term to the order or quote and downloads a clean summary PDF to attach.
Mode rules are enforced for you: the sea-and-inland-waterway-only terms (FAS, FOB, CFR, CIF) simply can't be selected for an air or road shipment, so a whole category of mistakes becomes impossible.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
The plan is a complete, paste-and-go runbook for Claude Code. You don't write code - you paste, answer questions, and approve.
It opens by interviewing you about your business. Before building anything, the plan has the AI agent ask about your real export process: which modes you ship, what your order/quote numbers look like, which Incoterms you actually use today, your risk-transfer preferences, who approves terms, and the messy exceptions (the customer who insists on DDP, the LCL vs FCL split, the named-place conventions you write into contracts). It reads a short tailored spec back to you, you confirm it, and only then does it build a tool shaped to your company - not a generic template.
Inside you'll find:
- The discovery interview script (8-12 tailored questions).
- The Incoterms 2020 decision logic and the mode constraints, ready to drop in.
- A step-by-step build: database, login, the scenario form, the recommendation engine, the responsibility matrix view, the approval gate, PDF export, and email notification.
- The "No API yet?" fallback: import orders from a Google Sheet or CSV and export approved terms back out in the exact columns your order system expects.
- A verification checklist so you know it actually works.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
This isn't a calculator you bookmark - it's a controlled internal tool:
- Login so only your team can use it.
- Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own orders and terms.
- A complete audit trail - who recommended what, who approved it, and exactly when.
- A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the AI drafts the recommended term and matrix, a coordinator reviews and approves, and only then is it written to the order. The AI never commits a term on its own.
- Duplicate guards keyed on the order/quote number so the same shipment can't be processed and saved twice.
Who it's for
Inside sales reps and export coordinators who quote international shipments and need to get the Incoterm right the first time - without becoming a customs expert. If you've ever had a freight or duty dispute trace back to a term someone picked off the top of their head, this is for you.
You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.