What Is a Shipping Bill? Meaning, Types, Fields
Before a single container is loaded, one declaration has to be accepted. It names the goods, the buyer, the value, the currency and the bank. Everything that happens afterwards, the clearance, the incentive, the certificate that proves you were paid, is built on what that declaration said.
The short definition
A shipping bill is the export declaration an exporter files with Indian Customs before goods leave the country. It is the entry required by section 50 of the Customs Act, 1962, and the current regulations define it precisely: an electronic integrated declaration that has been accepted and assigned a unique number by the Indian Customs Electronic Data Interchange System, together with its electronic records or print outs. No shipping bill, no clearance, and nothing loads.
The legal basis, named exactly
Section 50 of the Customs Act, 1962 says the exporter of any goods shall make entry by presenting, electronically on the customs automated system, a shipping bill in the case of goods to be exported in a vessel or aircraft, and a bill of export in the case of goods to be exported by land. Two more sub-sections carry the weight most exporters feel later:
- Section 50(2). The exporter presenting a shipping bill or bill of export makes and subscribes to a declaration as to the truth of its contents.
- Section 50(3). The exporter must ensure the accuracy and completeness of the information given, the authenticity and validity of any supporting document, and compliance with any restriction or prohibition on the goods.
The electronic filing itself runs under the Shipping Bill (Electronic Integrated Declaration and Paperless Processing) Regulations, 2019, notified as Notification No. 33/2019-Customs (N.T.) dated 25 April 2019, which superseded the 2011 regulations. Four of its eight regulations are worth knowing by heart:
- Regulation 3. The authorised person enters the declaration and uploads the supporting documents on ICEGATE under a digital signature, or has the declaration made at a customs service centre.
- Regulation 4. The shipping bill is deemed filed and self assessment complete the moment a shipping bill number is generated for the declaration. That number and date are what every downstream system quotes back at you.
- Regulation 6. Keep the assessed copy of the shipping bill and every supporting document in original for five years from the date of presentation, and produce them if asked.
- Regulation 8. Contravening the regulations carries a penalty which may extend to fifty thousand rupees.
Shipping bill or bill of export: the distinction people get wrong
They are not two names for one thing. Section 50 splits them by how the goods leave: a shipping bill for goods going out in a vessel or aircraft, a bill of export for goods going out by land. A consignment trucked to a land customs station on a neighbouring border is a bill of export, however routinely everyone in the room calls it a shipping bill.
The forms are prescribed by the Shipping Bill and Bill of Export (Forms) Regulations, 2017, notified as Notification No. 60/2017-Cus.(N.T.) dated 29 June 2017, which superseded the 1991 forms regulations. There are four prescribed forms in all: a shipping bill is presented in Form SB I or Form SB II, and a bill of export in Form SB III or Form SB IV, as the case may be.
The colour coded types, honestly
Search for the types of shipping bill and you will be told, on page after page, that there are four or five and that each is printed on its own colour of paper: white for free goods, yellow for dutiable, green for drawback, and so on. Repeated often enough, it now reads as current law. It is not.
The colour scheme belongs to the era when a shipping bill was a physical form handed across a counter and sorted by sight. The regulations in force today do not use it. The 2017 forms regulations name four forms, SB I to SB IV, and specify them by paper size, margins, paper weight and type size; colour is not one of the specifications. The 2019 electronic filing regulations then define the shipping bill itself as an electronic integrated declaration accepted and assigned a unique number by the customs system. Data has no colour.
Two distinctions that are current do the work the colours used to do, and both change what you can claim afterwards. The first is the scheme code carried on each item of the declaration, which records what the item is being exported under, drawback among them. The second is which section the clearance order is made under, section 51(1) for ordinary export goods and section 69 for goods being cleared from a warehouse for export. Both are covered below. If someone hands you a colour, ask them for the scheme code instead.
How the declaration is actually built
On paper a shipping bill reads as one document. In the customs system it is a nested structure, and understanding the nesting explains most of what confuses people about it:
- The shipping bill level. One record per bill: your Importer Exporter Code and branch serial, exporter type and class, state of origin, the Authorised Dealer code, the consignee, port of loading, port and country of final destination.
- The invoice level. A shipping bill carries at least one invoice and can carry several. Each invoice has its own number, date, currency, buyer, terms and deductions.
- The item level. Each invoice carries at least one item, each with its own scheme code, tariff heading, description, quantity, unit price and present market value.
- The scheme attachments. Drawback, licence, cess and similar details hang off the items that claim them.
That is why one shipping bill can cover three invoices to the same buyer, and why a single wrong currency on invoice two does not invalidate invoices one and three but does break the matching for the money that invoice two brings in.
The fields that decide whether your money can be matched later
Most of a shipping bill is customs business. A short list of fields is realisation business, and they are the ones to read twice before submission, because after clearance they are expensive to move.
Authorised Dealer code
The customs message format is blunt about what this field is for: the bank code where the foreign exchange remittance would take place. Get it wrong and the shipment leaves under one bank while the money arrives at another, which is exactly the mismatch that leaves an entry open. The AD code also has to be registered at that port before the bill will file at all. Full detail in AD code explained, and the port codes themselves are in the port code directory.
DGFT states the downstream consequence in its own eBRC generation rules: where the AD code on the shipping bill does not match the remittance AD code carried on the inward remittance message, the system warns that the two disagree and asks the exporter to change the AD code on the shipping bill to match the bank. In other words, a field you filled in months before the money arrived is the field that decides whether the certificate generates cleanly.
Invoice number, date and currency
These three are the join key between the shipping bill and the payment. A remittance in USD against an invoice raised in EUR does not map cleanly, and no amount of correspondence afterwards makes it map.
Buyer, consignee and third party
The consignee who receives the goods and the buyer who pays for them are separate fields, and so are the third party details. When payment comes from a name that appears nowhere on the bill, the mapping question follows you all the way to the certificate.
Nature of payment and period of payment
The declaration records how the export is to be paid: letter of credit, direct payment, delivery against acceptance, advance payment, or not applicable, with a payment period in days. This is your own statement of when the money is due, which makes it the first thing anyone reads when it is late.
Freight, insurance, commission, discount and other deductions
Each is a separate declared field with its own currency. They are also the entire vocabulary of the sentence you will one day write to explain why a realisation is short of the invoice. Declare them at export and the explanation is already on file; leave them blank and you are reconstructing it years later.
Scheme code, and the one that means no money is coming
Every item carries a scheme code. Scheme code 99 is defined for NFEI, No Foreign Exchange Involved, and items under it cannot be clubbed with items under any other scheme code, so an NFEI shipping bill is entirely NFEI. That matters here for one reason: an NFEI shipping bill is a declaration that no foreign exchange is coming. It will never produce a realisation certificate, and it should never sit in your pending pile waiting for one.
The RoDTEP declaration, which is made at filing or not at all
This is the most expensive thing a desk can get wrong on a shipping bill, because nothing afterwards repairs it. A RoDTEP claim is made on the bill itself, item by item, by setting the RoDTEP information code to RODTEPY rather than RODTEPN, and by submitting declaration statement code RD001 against every item claimed. The customs advisory on the scheme states the consequence plainly: if RODTEPY is not specifically claimed in the shipping bill, no RoDTEP would accrue to the exporter. And it closes the door behind you, because no changes in the claim are allowed after the filing of the export general manifest.
So the intent has to be on the bill before the goods go. Not when the rates are checked, not when the scroll appears, not when someone in accounts notices the credit never came. The states a bill passes through afterwards, the EGM among them, are covered in shipping bill status and the EGM.
IGST payment status
Exports go out either under bond or letter of undertaking with no IGST paid, or against payment of IGST with the taxable value and IGST amount declared. Which one you chose at export decides which refund route is open to you afterwards. See eBRC for GST refund on exports.
Where the Let Export Order fits
Filing the bill is not clearance. Clearance is a separate order under section 51(1) of the Customs Act, made when the proper officer is satisfied that the goods are not prohibited and that any duty and charges have been paid, permitting clearance and loading for exportation. That order is what the trade calls the Let Export Order, and its date is the date the goods are legally free to load.
Regulation 5 of the 2019 regulations sets out how it happens now: after assessment, payment of any duty or cess, and examination of the goods where required, the order permitting clearance under section 51(1), or under section 69 where the goods are being cleared from a warehouse for export, is made, recorded on ICEGATE, and conveyed electronically to the authorised person, the custodian and anyone else the exporter designates.
Fixing a shipping bill after the goods have gone
Declaring the wrong scheme is a common and expensive mistake, and there is a route back. The Export Entry (Post export conversion in relation to instrument based scheme) Regulations, 2025, notified as Notification No. 21/2025-Customs (N.T.) dated 3 April 2025, replaced the 2022 shipping bill conversion regulations and now cover export entries generally, including entries for goods exported by post or courier.
The application for conversion is made in writing within one year from the date of clearance under section 51(1) or section 69, or from the date of the entry under section 84. The jurisdictional Commissioner of Customs may extend that by up to six months for reasons recorded in writing, and the jurisdictional Chief Commissioner by up to a further six months. Conversion is allowed on documentary evidence that existed at the time the goods were exported, subject to conditions in regulation 4 and on payment of a fee.
Read the direction of that rule carefully. The evidence has to have existed at export. Conversion lets you correct a declaration; it does not let you build a claim after the fact.
What the shipping bill sets in motion
- An entry in the RBI's export ledger. Filing opens an entry that stays open until your bank matches the payment against the bill. That mechanism, and how entries close, is in EDPMS closure, explained.
- The realisation certificate. When the payment lands, your bank transmits it to DGFT as an inward remittance message and you map that remittance to this shipping bill to generate the eBRC. The mechanics are in how to generate an eBRC.
- Incentive claims. RoDTEP and duty drawback are claimed against exports and settled against realised proceeds. See eBRC for RoDTEP and duty drawback.
- Your own record. Copies of the bill are the working document for all of the above. If you need one out of ICEGATE, the route is in downloading a shipping bill from ICEGATE, and the states it passes through are in shipping bill status and the EGM.
If what you actually need is the data rather than the paper, the free shipping bill extractor reads a bill PDF into a spreadsheet, field by field, with no sign up. It is the fastest way to get invoice numbers, values and currencies out of a stack of bills and into whatever you reconcile in.
Frequently asked questions
What is a shipping bill in export?
It is the export declaration filed with Indian Customs under section 50 of the Customs Act, 1962, before goods leave the country. Under the 2019 electronic filing regulations it is defined as an electronic integrated declaration accepted and assigned a unique number by the Indian Customs Electronic Data Interchange System, including its electronic records or print outs.
What is the difference between a shipping bill and a bill of export?
Section 50 splits them by mode. A shipping bill is filed for goods to be exported in a vessel or aircraft; a bill of export is filed for goods to be exported by land. The forms regulations of 2017 prescribe Form SB I or SB II for a shipping bill and Form SB III or SB IV for a bill of export.
What is the Let Export Order on a shipping bill?
It is the order under section 51(1) of the Customs Act permitting clearance and loading of the goods for exportation, made once the proper officer is satisfied the goods are not prohibited and any duty and charges are paid. For goods cleared from a warehouse for export the order is made under section 69 instead. It is recorded on ICEGATE and conveyed electronically.
How long must a shipping bill be kept?
Five years from the date the shipping bill was presented. Regulation 6 of the Shipping Bill (Electronic Integrated Declaration and Paperless Processing) Regulations, 2019 requires the exporter to retain the assessed copy and all supporting documents in original for that period and to produce them if required.
Can a shipping bill be corrected after export?
A declaration can be converted to another instrument based scheme after export under the Export Entry (Post export conversion in relation to instrument based scheme) Regulations, 2025. The application is made in writing within one year of clearance, extendable by up to six months by the jurisdictional Commissioner and up to a further six months by the Chief Commissioner, and it must rest on documentary evidence that existed at the time of export.
Does a shipping bill prove I was paid?
No. It proves the goods were declared and cleared for export. Proof of payment is the eBRC, generated by mapping the realised inward remittance to the shipping bill it settles.