SITPRO
International Trade Guides

Financial

Letters of Credit Checklist and Guide for Importers

UCP 600 Edition Revised - July 2007

Letters of Credit - Checklist and Guide for Importers
SITPRO has produced a set of three Letters of Credit Checklist and Guides for Importers, Exporters and Export Sales Representatives. The checklist designed for exporters is intended primarily for use in export sales and shipping departments. The export sales representative's guide advises on credits and some of the other responsibilities assumed on overseas visits. We strongly recommend you provide your customers with copies of these guides to back-up your own discussions with them. This checklist is specifically to assist importers: detailing the recommended procedures to be followed, including an item-by-item reference to completing a letter of credit application form. To ensure a letter of credit is workable, trouble-free and provides security of payment, it is essential to take simple yet effective precautions at the start. Working through the checkpoints set out in the various sections of the guide will help reduce discrepancies and associated unplanned costs. The simple specimen form included in the guide, while only an example, will not be found to be significantly different from those used by the banks themselves. Successive surveys by SITPRO and others have shown that well in excess of fifty percent of documents presented by exporters to banks for payment under letters of credit are rejected on first presentation. This can cause expensive delays for both the exporter and the importer and may even result in a lesser payment or no payment at all. A great many of those rejections could be avoided if more care was taken to ensure that the documents called for in the credit are properly completed. The SITPRO Letters of Credit Checklists and Guides are designed to minimise unnecessary costs and risk when trading on the basis of letters of credit. They are aligned... [continues]

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