How to track inbound shipments and landed cost on Starch
Tracking inbound shipments and calculating landed cost means knowing — before inventory hits your warehouse — exactly what each unit actually costs you: freight, duties, customs fees, and any other charges that accumulate between your supplier and your dock. It's the difference between knowing your true margin and guessing at it. What this looks like in practice varies depending on how you source, how many SKUs you carry, and how many hands touch a shipment before it arrives. A brand importing containers from overseas has a different version of this problem than one receiving domestic LTL freight, but both share the same core challenge: the data lives in too many places at once — carrier portals, freight forwarder emails, QuickBooks bills, customs invoices — and reconciling it manually is slow and error-prone. On Starch, you end up with a single view that shows each open shipment, its current status, and the landed cost built up so far — pulled from your accounting system, your bank transactions, and any carrier or forwarder portal your team logs into. When a shipment closes, the final landed cost flows into your cost-of-goods numbers without a manual entry. You describe what you want to see — 'show me each inbound PO, expected arrival, freight cost, duties, and cost-per-unit at landed' — and that dashboard exists, updating as new data comes in.
Why it matters
If you're pricing products without accurate landed cost, your margins are fiction. A 10% freight spike or an unexpected duty assessment can turn a profitable SKU into a break-even one, and you won't catch it until month-end reconciliation — if then. Getting this right means you can reprice proactively, flag shipments where costs have drifted from the estimate, and give finance accurate COGS before the invoice clears, not weeks after.
Common pitfalls
Using the PO price as a proxy for landed cost all the way to the warehouse — then adjusting in a lump at month end instead of as each charge comes in. Tracking freight in one place and duties in another, so no single record ever shows the full picture. Reconciling container costs in total rather than allocating to the SKU level, which means margin by product is always an estimate. Waiting for the final customs statement before opening a shipment record, when most of the cost components are knowable much earlier.
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