All right, we are at the hour, so we'll go ahead and get started for everybody. Hi, my name is Alex. Thank you for joining today, our Getting Started with the Customs ACE Portal webinar. This is a local webinar that's hosted by the Salt Lake City office. We primarily support the Utah and Las Vegas metro areas, but we had quite a bit of interest in the network on this one. So if you're joining in from somewhere in the Midwest or North Central region or wherever else in Utah, we are happy, in the U.S., we're happy to have you. And we hope you're staying safe in the crazy weather storms out there your way. Send some snow to us here in Utah if you have it. We'd love it.
On that note, I just have a few housekeeping items before we get started. So we have planned about 40- 45 minutes of content today with Q&A to follow. Please submit your Q&A questions in the Q&A box. We will be answering them live as we go along. Our District Trade and Customs Compliance Manager, Nate Bartholomew, is on the line, so he'll be taking care of those. Anything he cannot get to, we will address at the end. And then if for whatever reason, we still don't get to your question today, we will put you in touch with a local expert to get you the information that you need. How will you receive the materials today? No, we are not recording today's session, but you will get a copy of the slides after you complete a short survey.
You'll see that survey come out from me in the next few hours, and please feel free to reach out to me if you have any issues with that. And then finally, we invite you to subscribe to our events to receive our local webinar invites or global market updates, our Horizon Brief blog. We love you guys staying connected with us, so the QR code on the screen is there for you if you want it. All right, and then the last bit of business here is I'll introduce our speaker. Our speaker today is Katherine Brown. She is our Senior Compliance Specialist in Salt Lake City. She's been with Expeditors for more than 11 years, and she started in the customs department. She received her licensed customs broker, her broker license within the first 3 months of being with us.
So she's one smart cookie. We really like her over here. She brings into her current role a lot of tenure, especially in customs, as our customs brokerage manager. So she's great. She's got some great materials presented or ready to present today. So turning it over to you, Katherine. You're still on mute, Katherine.
Well, that's helpful. Okay. So thanks, Alex. I appreciate it. We have our typical disclaimer here. We're not trade lawyers. The purpose of this presentation is to provide information so that you can make the best decisions you can and utilize the ACE Portal to the best of your ability. So, the bulk of this training covers import-related topics. However, please note that the ACE Portal also covers some other areas. It also has export data as well as some truck data and things like that. So, this presentation is geared mostly towards questions we've received from the Salt Lake and Las Vegas markets, but like Alex said, we're really happy to have a whole bunch of other people from inside the U.S. on this call as well.
As this is a webinar, feel free to follow along in your ACE Portal if you feel like you can. The ACE Portal can be a little finicky at times, so if it slows down, that may not work, but just something that's out there as an option as I go through this. As Alex mentioned, these slides will be going out after you complete a survey. This presentation is meant to be a resource, so it's a little slide intensive, but it's supposed to help you as you're navigating the ACE Portal after, after this presentation. We'll be covering how to get access to the ACE Portal, also what level of access you currently have, basic portal navigation, responding to Customs in the portal, running reports, and then how and where to file a protest within the portal.
All right, so there's a lot of you on here, so you probably care about the ACE portal, but why should you care about the ACE portal? ACE stands for Automated Commercial Environment, and this is a pretty critical tool for importers. It provides a direct access to customs data and import and export transactions. This offers a method of internal control and record keeping that are essential for compliance with trade laws and regulations. The ACE portal has many different functions. We won't be covering every single function today, but some of the key functions are using the portal to improve compliance, monitor who's filing your customs entries, extract historical reporting, and utilizing the ACE portal means that you are, as a company, following a stated customs best practice. So what's in the portal?
This is not a comprehensive list, but these are some of the key functions, and we'll be covering most of these today. So within the portal, you can monitor communication methods and different variety of communication with U.S. Customs. You can create blanket statements for things like anti-dumping, textile certificates. There's a whole list there, but you can create these blanket statements that stay on file with customs and in your portal. You can also query anti-dumping and countervailing cases. I'll show you where you see this in the portal. This is the most up-to-date information you'll see on anti-dumping and countervailing cases. You can also access your Importer Security Filing data and run reports to see timeliness and any questions or issues you may have there.
And then you can access near real-time data to proactively monitor the activity with U.S. Customs under your IRS number. So quick plug in here. A lot of the information that I'm providing today can be found on the ACE training website. I'll provide a link a couple of times throughout this presentation. I'll also have a helpful links list at the end of this presentation. Most of the information I'll be going over can be found at this website. But I am covering specific topics that have come up quite a bit over the last 6- 12 months. If there is something that I don't cover today, this training resource is your best initial line of questioning to see if you can get answers for that.
However, there are certain functions that you can't do inside of the portal without going through ACE Support first, and I'll touch on several of those and let you know what those are. This is an available resource for you, so you can either call or email them. We are hearing from importers that the phone calls are getting through a little bit faster, they're getting faster responses. That will probably change in the future, but right now, that's what we're hearing from people. So if you're interested in getting in contact with them, these are your best resources. Okay, so to start, ACE Portal access. The two questions I'll be covering here are: how do you get access and how can you tell what level of access you have within the ACE Portal? Okay, so there's two steps to gaining access to your account.
The first thing you'll have to do is go to the main ACE Portal page. I'll show it to you in a minute, but I have a link here in the presentation. Within that page, you'll click on the Trade or PGA User Login, and then at that stage, you can either log in or create a new account. If you don't have an account and you're trying to create an account, and the system notifies you that there's some kind of an issue or that somebody already has access to your account, so you can't go in and create one, there's two options that you have out there. The first step that you'll need to do is find out who the Trade Account Owner is within your company to have them grant you access.
If you can't figure out who the Trade Account Owner is, or if that person has left your company, you'll need to work with ACE Support directly to gain ownership of the account. This can take quite a few steps, but you will have to go through the portal, which I've added again here. You'll have to email them or call them and work with them to verify your identity. They are pretty strict on this, but as you could probably understand, that you want them to confirm who you are and make sure that you're actually with your company before they give access to this kind of data. Okay, so let's say you've already got access. So how do you know what access level you have? So the first steps are going to be logging in. So as I mentioned, this is the main ACE Portal page.
You'll click on Trade PGA User Login. You'll log in on the typical page. You are going to receive this one-time security token email every time you log in. This is something that occasionally we've found hiccups with customers where the domain, this domain here, I've got this, the cbp.dhs.gov, for some reason, has been, either blocked or marked as trash within a company domain. You'll want to make sure that that's open if for some reason you aren't receiving these security token emails. After you enter in your security token, you'll need to accept terms, and this is a pretty standard page. If you decline, you won't be able to get in. And then you'll be brought here to this main page. I do want to say a quick note here.
I don't know how many of you have been in the ACE Portal, but lately, when I go to log in, every once in a while, it will show some kind of an error page saying the server is down. It's a grayed out page. I'm finding that if you refresh or if you just click in back into that ace.cbp.gov website, it will then let you back in. So even though it shows the server is down, just refresh and it should bring you back to this page. If you're doing that and you come back a couple hours later and try again and it still won't let you in, you'll want to reach out to ACE Support directly. I'll be talking about a couple different aspects from this page later on.
Right now, again, our focus is how do you tell what your specific access level is within ACE? So when you're looking for that, you'll go to this tools section here, and then you'll click on User Access, and then you'll see right here under user role, what access level that you have. If you are the Trade Account Owner or a Proxy Trade Account Owner , you should be able to see everyone within your organization who has access and their access levels. So as I mentioned, there's a different type of user access. There are three specific types within ACE. The only one that has to be designated by Customs, specifically through their ACE support team, is the Trade Account Owner . You can't add that manually. That has to be done through Customs, and they have basically full control of the entire site.
They are the ones who give access to anyone else within your organization who needs access. Proxy Trade Account Owner is an underutilized role that I haven't seen used commonly, but that I think is probably one of the most important roles right now, because a trade account—a Proxy Trade Account Owner, they're assigned by the Trade Account Owner, but they also can, they can do everything that a Trade Account Owner can do. And then if the Trade Account Owner leaves the company for some reason, it's much easier to have a Proxy Trade Account Owner upgraded to the Trade Account Owner by Customs than it is if you're starting from scratch. And then I would say the majority of access levels outside of Trade Account Owner that we see is Account User.
Account users only have access based off what Trade Account Owner s and Proxy Trade Account Owner s have given them. So anytime you're looking for your access, if you are an account user and you can't see something, you'll need to go to your Trade Account Owner or Proxy Trade Account Owner to get access to that area. I've also added a helpful link here. It's also at the end of the presentation, but if you are the Trade Account Owner and you're struggling to add different levels, then this is a helpful tool to be able to get those added, and changed as needed. One thing of note here is that we don't typically recommend you give third parties access to your ACE Portal unless absolutely necessary.
This is up to you, and there are travelers and consultants that may need access to do certain functions for you, but that's something you'd want to manage tightly because there is quite a bit of information in the ACE Portal that you may want to keep internal. Okay, third section. Take a deep breath. This is going to be a pretty heavy presentation, so I've added in a couple fun facts. So here's one for you. So I don't know if you knew this, but the London Bridge was the largest antique ever sold, and it was imported into the United States in the sixties by an oil tycoon in Arizona. So if you'd like to visit the London Bridge, it's in Havasu, Arizona.
It was imported brick by brick and built, and this is also the import that Customs then made the rule for antiques over a hundred years old are duty-free. So they imported the London Bridge duty-free in the sixties, and you can visit it in Havasu, Arizona. So there you go. All right, so next section. We're going to talk about navigating the ACE Portal. So I touched lightly on the tools section over here, but I'll go through each of these sections and what's available to you going forward. So when you first open, you're on your home screen. It's very straightforward. If you need to come back here, this is where you can look. You can search things here, but typically, you'll go through some of these top tools to see what's going on.
Okay, this is the section you'll likely spend most of your time, especially under this importer section. If you're an FTZ or a Bonded Warehouse or if you're doing protests, you'll also go into some other areas of this section. But most of the things like reporting that I'll cover today all happen under this importer category within this homepage. The next is account search. So this section is helpful if you have multiple companies or IRS numbers under your company's umbrella. This is where you can see individual accounts and their IRS numbers, and just a high-level overview if you have multiple accounts. If you are missing accounts here, the Trade Account Owner will need to work with Customs to get those added into your ACE Portal specifically. References. This is an extremely helpful tab.
So as I mentioned, a lot of the things I'll be talking about today can be found in some job aids and some tutorials on Customs website. You can click here and go directly to that ACE training webpage. Here is where you can query antidumping and countervailing cases. This is the absolute most up-to-date information you will find about antidumping. There's many different websites that you can go to, but this website specifically, if you're looking for specific case details, this is where all the information is stored. The CEE directory or Center for Excellence, I don't know how many of you know this, but as an importer, you are assigned to a specific Center for Excellence.
I'll show you where you can see which center you're assigned to in a minute, but this is where you'll be able to find any email addresses or contact details if for some reason you need to reach out to the CEE directly. This right here will show you information about licenses if you're a licensed broker or some updates and renewal information. I'm not going to be covering anything about trucks today, but this is where you can do manifests with trucks. So those of you who do Canada and Mexico business, if this is something you do directly, this is a section where there are some helpful job aids and tips on this ACE training webpage, if that's something you want to look at. The gold rate, if you're curious. Also, these two right here, these are the other two calls I'd like to make.
So this will link you directly to the HTS website if you're looking for tariffs information or want to see it on the main tariff page. This second one here I find super helpful. You can search by individual tariffs and look at what statistical information is required for your information. So that one's quite helpful. Okay, so again, that's... We've gone through these top sections, the tools, if you remember, that's where we were talking about your access. I'm not going to cover them again. So if you start in accounts and then you go to importer, what kind of information can you see? If you have multiple companies under your umbrella, you'll see multiple companies here. Most of the things in the ACE Portal are broken out by IRS number.
There's not really a great way to combine those in any way, so you'll want to go in, click on Importer, and then click on your specific company, like here. So on this main page, you can see quite a bit of information here. We'll cover some of these over here and the key features that you can see. On this details page, you can see your IRS number. So if this has changed for some reason, you'll want to check and make sure it's the right IRS number. That's pretty standard, but just in case. When I was mentioning the Center, Centers for Excellence before, this will show your center ID. It's typically three letters. It can occasionally have a number or two in there. You can take the center ID-...
Go into the reference section and find out who exactly your center for excellence is and who the contacts are. You can also see what kind of things you're set up to do. So if you're set up for drawback, importing, any extra information. So that's in your details page. In your contact section, this will show everyone that is listed at your company as a contact for customs. This doesn't necessarily mean they're a notified party, but these are the contacts listed. If someone is listed here and needs to become the Trade Account Owner, it is easier than if they're not listed here, but this should show you all of the contacts. Addresses, this shows what address you have on file.
I'll talk in a couple of minutes about how you can receive forms from Customs, but you want to make sure that your address is up-to-date and current. If this is not the correct address, you can reach out to your broker, and they can file a form to update this with Customs. But you do want to make sure that the addresses you have listed are the correct addresses on file, just in case Customs decides to reach out or maybe even visit. Notify parties. These are the people who are going to receive notifications directly from US Customs. You're going to want to check here and make sure that they're up to date and that the individuals listed haven't left the company. Bonds.
This has become a hot topic with all of the extra tariffs over the last 12-18 months, and you'll want to check this and see what bonds you have on file. This is an easy way to look. I did want to do a special call-out for ACH Refund Authorization. So as some of you may be aware, some of you potentially not, manual checks for refunds from Customs will stop being issued on February 6th, 2026. So this is where you can enter your bank account details to receive refunds. This is completely separate from ACH debit. ACH debit has to be set up through a form that's emailed to Customs that they then activate. That is not the same as ACH refund, so they don't correlate those two things.
If you are expecting any type of a refund from Customs, this is where you'll want to put your banking details. I'll cover in a couple of slides later how you can look at any refund status. But again, if you're expecting to see any kind of a refund after February sixth, this is a really important tab to make sure you've got updated. And then the last two items on this specific page that I'll cover in depth later are this report section and form section. So I'll go more in depth on those in a couple of minutes. Okay, so now we've kind of got our importer information. We know what's in there. How do we communicate with Customs within the portal, and how does Customs know how to communicate with us? So you'll start again by coming to your homepage.
You're going to go into Accounts, and then you're going to go into that Importer line again. You'll click on the importer you're looking at, and then this will bring you to this main details page. So this is that page that we were looking at a couple of minutes ago. This is a screenshot from Customs website, so I promise I'm not putting someone's Social Security number out there. Apparently, Bob, the importer, is out there. So if you're looking for the different modes of communication that Customs has through the ACE Portal, you'll go to Details, Mode of Communication, and then when you click on that, you've got two options. You have mail and portal, and mail means physical mail, so this will go to the address on file.
Typically, this is defaulted to mail, just because that was the standard of communication before the ACE Portal became more prevalent. You can click on both, or you can do one or the other. I typically recommend both, but it's up to you. Again, this is something where we talked about it a minute ago, you want to make sure your notify parties are up to date, and you also want to make sure that your mailing addresses are up to date. If Customs is sending information, we typically find that if the notify party is no longer there or Customs doesn't have a specific notify party, mail from Customs will be sent to accounting or kind of a no-man's land, and then it doesn't get actioned.
Most Customs forms have a timeline of 20-30 days, which can cause a little bit of a headache on your side. So something just to be aware of and double-check. You'll want to go in and check your mode of communication and make sure it's activated to the one that you would like. If we're looking at portal, then you'll come back to that main screen. Again, we went to Accounts, Importer, we selected our importer, and we're back on this main screen again. To see any kind of forms that Customs has issued to you or to respond to forms, you'll come here to this forms box. When you click on that box, this is what opens up for you. You have a couple of options here.
One thing to note is within the ACE Portal, the entry number is the key to every entry. So you'll enter the entry number here, or you can see anything that's pending a response or overdue. There's also a way to run a report to see any forms that are out there for you. I'll show that to you when we're running reports, but that's an option as well. So if you come in here and you've got one, or you click in here, Pending Response, and you click on the entry number, then you'll see this Actions drop, where you can click Respond. You'll then need to put in your name, title, phone and email, and then your response. And again, I've also got a helpful training guide here for you, as you're going through this.
Also, if you need to upload documentation, you can upload here. It's common for brokers to upload in what we call DIS. I always forget. It's a document imaging system for customs. But you can upload any documents that you need here directly. Okay, I'm going to take another breath before we start in the next section. I've got another fun fact for you. When the Apollo 11 crew returned from the moon, they had to file a customs declaration for the moon rocks and dust samples that they brought back. This form listed that their flight routing was Cape Kennedy to the Moon to Honolulu. So there's your second fun fact of the day. Okay, scheduling reports and how do you run a report? We're going to start from the main page again.
We're going to go to Accounts, Importer. We're going to select the importer. I only have one option, but you may have more than one. And then we're going to click on this Reports button here. This will open this launch pad. There's a couple of different things you can do here, but I would say 99% of the time, you're going to click on Folders and go straight into this. So I'll be showing how to run an entry summary report. As you can see, there are many different types of, types of reporting available. If you are just starting out, this public folder is your best friend. Public folder, ACE, and then Trade, and as you go down, you can select any number of reports to run for your company. You may need to run a report several times to get the parameters that you want.
I'll show you a couple of editing features that are in here. Something to note is that there's a key difference between your portal and a broker's portal. A broker can only see information for entries that they have filed with Customs, and you can see all of the information for all brokers. So once you have access to this portal, you should see 100% of activity under your IRS number, where brokers can't. Also, there's quite a few of these reports that brokers can't run due to the information that's on those reports and Customs deeming it, whether it's essential or not. So just know that sometimes your broker will ask you to run reports if you're looking for information because they just can't run them.
So again, for this report specifically, we would go to Public Folders, ACE, Importer, Entry Summary, Entry Summary again, and then this is the report I'm going to be using as an example. This is a pretty common report that importers run when just looking for high-level detail of their entries. So when you click to run the report, you get this option here. So you can select any number of items here. One thing that I recommend is always putting in a begin and end date. For those of you who are legacy ACE Portal users, reports used to break all the time, or they could take hours and hours to run. This does occasionally happen with the new Portal if there's a lot of users on the account.
However, to make that a little less common, if you're putting an entry date and/or begin and end dates, then that will lower the parameters and the chances of your report running. I'll also show you a couple of things that you can do to maybe make that a little bit less of a headache. One key button I'd like to talk about here is this section right here. So if you're going over here and you want to change a parameter and you don't know what options are available, clicking this button here will then show you all of the options. So I'll show you one of those right here. So a common one that people want to add to different reports is a Post Summary Correction indicator. So was a Post Summary Correction filed on this entry? You'll see this note here.
When you initially click on it, this section will be blank. If you want to see what indicators are available, you click this Refresh button here, and that's how you can see these two indicators. Another popular filter or column that we're seeing is Liquidation Status. So again, if you click on Liquidation Status, then this Refresh button, you'll see all of these options that pop up. Typically, this liquidated one is the most popular, but you could also select any of them or all, and they will show up as a column on your report. Okay, so once we've got the report created, or at least we've got our begin and end date and any of these extra parameters that we want, we would click Run. And once you click Run, this is the report that would come out.
So I've redacted some information that would be, for importers. But again, something that I mentioned earlier and that's really key to pay attention to, is that entry number is how Customs communicates. They don't really look at house bills or master bills as much. There is a place where you can add house bills and master bills, and I'll show you that in a minute. But entry summary is always, this number is always going to start. I'm also going to take you on a teeny tangent here for an entry number, because a common question with entries are: Who was my broker? Or who filed this customs entry? So the first three digits of an entry number will always be the filer code of the broker who filed the customs entry for that specific entry.
So I've added a link, and I've added a little clip here for where you can see the filer code list. For Expeditors, specifically, 231 is our entry code. So if it starts with 231, that is an Expeditor's filed customs entry. Anything else would be another broker. Okay, so backtracking just a little bit. So let's say you've run one of these canned reports and you want to change the filters or add a couple of filters for your columns. You would do that by, when you're in this main page, by coming to this top right corner and clicking Design. And then over here in this query section, you would click this icon here. And what that will do is give you these options for query filters.
So you can click and drag and move things around in here as needed, to change those parameters. Then you can either apply and close or just run the report directly.... Once you've run a report, you've got it to where you want or mostly to where you want, how do you save that report? Because, again, ACE can be tricky in the sense that if you're not saving reports, you're going to have to start all over again. If you want to schedule a report, you do have to save it first. You'll go up to the floppy disk, click Save As, and then this will pop up. I highly recommend saving reports into your personal folder. There is a way to have a shared folder across multiple users within your organization.
It doesn't share outside of your organization, so there is a way to do that. For me, I typically share in personal folders, and then I share to other people as needed. You would put it in personal folder, and then you can put in the file name that you choose. Then you'll click Save. Okay, let's say you have a saved report. These are a little out of order. Okay, if you have a saved report, it'll show in personal folder, and as you can see, I have this Entry Summary report right here. If you want to go in and edit this report after it's already been saved, then you'll start from the saved report by clicking on it here.
You'll go back to your design center, but in this instance, you're going to stay over here instead of going to the query section. So over here, you can add different columns. So if there's a column that wasn't part of the original report, this is a way to add those in. Just remember that any time that you make any change to the report, you need to make sure that you're saving it, because if you don't save it, it's going to be lost. Okay, so now you've saved your report, you've created it, you've got it exactly where you want it. How do you schedule the report? So, as I mentioned, sometimes it can take reports a significant amount of time to run. If you have a report that you need regularly, I highly recommend scheduling it. Very few times does the scheduling break.
It's typically when you're running just in real time, that you can have issues. That matters on how many people are using the ACE Portal. As more people use the ACE Portal, it does break a little more frequently. So creating and scheduling reports is really a great option. So you'll start by going into this, the main page in your personal folder, and then you'll click this ellipses and click Schedule. I'm not going to go into the scheduling page because it's fairly standard for when you're scheduling a report, but you can put in individuals that don't have access to ACE. You can schedule a report and send it to them. A really popular report for that is the trade, the trade refund report, which I'll show you here in a minute.
But the one key thing here that I think people miss most often is that you have to create the report and save the report and then schedule it. You can't just schedule from the main report page after you've run it. So, that's the one step that seems to get missed the most. Here are some of the most helpful reports. These are a lot of the reports that I go through and that are the most common for individuals. These are just basic Entry Summary reports. One of the nice things about this, as I mentioned, is if you look at the entry numbers, you can see who's filing entries for you, and you can go to that website and find out who the brokers are.
If you're new to your company or new to the ACE portal, or just trying to figure out what's going on with your different trade lanes, that can be extremely helpful to see high-level detail of who's filing entries, where they're being filed, what the HTS codes are being used, and if you have multiple entities, making sure that they're being filed under the correct entities. This report right here, I highly recommend. This will show any customs forms that are out there. So for those of you who don't know what these forms are, a CF-28 is a request for information from Customs. A 29 is a notification of action. A 46, 47 can be a couple of things. It can be a manipulation request, it can be a destruction. There's several different things that can occur on that form.
The 6051D is a detention form. So if you have UFLPA or forced labor protection detentions or any kind of a detention, that's that form. So if you run this report, you can see historically what's been issued against your company, and you could also see what's currently open. So that one is one that if, again, you're just trying to get a handle on what's going on and how your imports are being handled, these are very, very helpful. Liquidation has become a hot topic lately with IEEPA and trying to figure out which entries are past liquidation or ending the protest period. These two reports are extremely helpful with that. Anecdotally, the ES-701 report has broken on me several times and showed blank.
So that's one where if you are pretty sure that you should have something on a report, run it, and then if it shows up blank, come back to ACE a couple of hours later, run it again. If it's still showing blank and you're positive something should be on that report, make sure you're escalating to that ACE support desk, because this does happen on occasion where they're doing updates in the background and they don't realize that they've broken reports. I will say this, ES-702 is probably the most popular report for understanding liquidation. You can see if an entry has been liquidated. You can also see if the liquidation date has been suspended or extended. That is somewhat common. It doesn't happen on a lot of entries, but that's...
It's nothing to worry about too much, but it is something where you can be aware if Customs seems to be looking at certain entries, just at a high level, they'll typically suspend liquidation. Duty payment reports. These are reports, these next three reports are reports that brokers don't have access to, because they deal with finances and Customs does not give brokers access to that. So even if we file the entry, we won't be able to run these reports for you directly out of ACE. This top one is your monthly statement overview. So if you have a Customs pull from your account that you are unaware of where it came from or you can't tell which broker filed the entry, this monthly statement overview will be incredibly helpful.
Daily statement, I would assume that most of you probably aren't on daily statement, but if you are, this is where you can see and schedule daily statement reports. The last one here, especially as we're talking about refunds, either from post summary corrections, protests, or anything that's out there, this report will show you the status of any refunds that you have out there. So this is one that I see commonly scheduled to go to an accounting team to help reconcile if there are extra fees coming back to the importer. So again, as I mentioned earlier, this is how you schedule. Oh, I think I went backwards. Okay. One of the last topics that I'll be covering is filing protests. I'm not going to go super in-depth on this one. I'm mostly talking about access. Oh! I'm sorry.
There's a sound effect. I don't know if you heard that. Filing protests. So this is very popular right now. So how do you get access to protests? This is a key step here. You won't typically get protest filer access with your initial A-ACE account, not even at the Trade Account Owner level. So if you need access to file protests for any reason, I put this helpful tip here, but you do need to go through ACE support to have them create you as a protest filer. And then, of course, if you would like agents to file protests, you'll need to work with them. So how do you know if you have protest access? This is where you'll come back to that homepage, go to Accounts, and then typically again, we do Importer, but in this instance, we're not going to.
We're going to scroll down, and you're going to see that you're a protest filer. Again, this is only something that ACE can give access to. There are certain things that you'll see. My portal may be a little different than yours. There are certain accesses that even as a Trade Account Owner, ACE has to give you access to if it's something that you're going to be doing. They don't give it to you as blanket access. If you click on Protest, it looks very similar to when you click on Importer. You've got a lot of details, and then here you have these two options. The first thing we're going to go into is Protest. If you're going to file a protest, click on Protest Filer, and then click Protest. Then this is the main page.
So again, I'm not going to go super in-depth on how you exactly create a protest in here, but if you wanted to, you could click here and create protest. You would select if you want a 514 or a 520D, there are specific requirements for each, and then you would go in and put your entry details and post details there. Once a protest is filed, you can search it by the protest number, the protest status. There's a bunch of things here. Again, entry number is your best option when you're searching a protest, and then those search results will all show up down here. So once it's filed, you should be able to see it, 100% of the protests that are filed. Protest reporting is a little different.
I like being able to go through it this way because it's a little more straightforward than the main reporting page. It will take you back into essentially the same page, but it will take you straight to the protest section, where you can see the details and well, you can see basic details and then more in-depth details, but this will also show you the statuses of each protest that has been filed. It can be technically an accepted status, but that doesn't mean that it is accepted with Customs. That just means that Customs received it, they're looking at it, and then you'll see finalized details later. Okay, so as I mentioned, I put a whole bunch of helpful links throughout the presentation. I've added more here. Some of these things I didn't cover, but that are incredibly helpful.
One of the reasons I didn't go super in-depth on protests is because there's a wide variety of why people need to file a protest. This guide right here is one of the best guides for filing protests, so this will help you as you're going through that process. I've also added, like, managing the user accounts. There's also a way to create an ad hoc report, one that is not from the canned reports. I typically start with a standard report and then modify from there. But if you, for some reason, don't like that process and you want to just start fresh and do everything new, this creating an ad hoc report, this guide is very, very helpful. I've also got the link here for signing up for ACH refunds.
So if that's something that we talked about earlier, not set up and you want to go back into, this is here as well. So, this is a little convoluted, but there's quite a few links here, and hopefully, this will help you as you're navigating the ACE Portal after this call. This course is NCBFAA accredited, so here's your information. Again, these slides will go out, after you've completed the survey after the call. So this is where you'll be able to get that information. I just want to say, too, thank you for everyone who's joined. Hopefully, this is helpful. I know this was a very basic presentation, but hopefully, this gets you started and through some of the hiccups that have been happening, with ACE.
... All right, back to me. So we will open up the Q&A. We still have quite a few in the Q&A box for us to get to. While we're going through those, I just wanted to point to some upcoming events we have, both at the corporate level and at our local level. These are all webinars, so feel free to join and register using the links, on this slide here. And with that, we'll get going into some of the questions. All right. So the first question we have is: need to support custom-made monthly modified query reports versus creating an ad hoc report. Oh, Katherine, you're still muted. Nate, I don't know if you're able to come off mute, too, so Katherine might be having some issues. Oh, let me try unmuting you guys. Technical difficulties. One second. That work for you guys?
Yes, that works. Sorry.
All right.
Quick got locked out. Okay, which question are we going through first?
This very top one. This person needs to support custom-made monthly modified query reports versus creating an ad hoc report.
Okay, so there's a couple of different ways to do this. So I'm going to pop back just a little bit in this slide. So the one key here that I've noticed is a little different from, from what the, like, the helpful guides from Customs are, is this box right here. So you need to make sure that you're in design mode. If you're not in design mode, you won't be able to add these and move these over. Or if you're looking for a query, you have to be in design mode to get into this and modify queries as well. If you want to do ad hoc reports, oops, this link that I've got here is the most helpful link that I've found for that. They can be super convoluted, but... Here, I'm just going to click enter live.
But that's the best bet there. So the most important part there is to go into design mode. If this is something you need more help with, maybe go through your local contact. But yeah, that's, that's what I find there.
Thanks, Katherine. Next question we have is: what if there's no user access listed? This person was following along in ACE, but it shows this functionality is currently not accessible.
So the first thing you need to check is your user access. If you can go into that main page and then go over to Tools, if you don't have any access at all, and there's no one else in your company who has access, you may need to go back to the ACE Support and let them know that you need to be the Trade Account Owner. Because typically when we see that, it means that you're not the Trade Account Owner and that the Trade Account Owner needs to give you access. Okay.
All right.
If you want to run... Do you want me just to jump? I can jump through these.
Okay.
So if I want to run our parts database using HTS codes in ACE, what steps are required to obtain the applicable duty rates, regulations, and any ADD/CVD information for each item? So unfortunately, as far as I can see in ACE, you can only see HTS code data as far as what you would see in the typical HTS. If you're looking for additional information, I do know that Expeditors is able to run that data and information. We have some things that we've got on our side that we've created to help provide that information. I would say also our TradeFlow system does that as well, but you essentially need to query the HTS codes with U.S. Customs to pull back things like anti-dumping and regulations. And unfortunately, I don't think there's any way to do that in ACE. So that.
We're required to audit the entries filed by our broker to ensure the correct tariff duty regulations are being applied. How can ACE be used to support and facilitate this audit process? Within that process, I would say the best thing you can do is set up a report that shows the information that you need. It will take quite a few run-throughs to get it to exactly where you want it, but it's probably your best option, would be to run the reporting. That will show everything that Customs shows on their side, and then you can look at it that way. I will say, too, just a little plug for Expeditors, we do have reporting that we can run that are canned reports that show ITA and Section 232.
If you need those, reach out to your contact at Expeditors, and they should be able to run that for you. Unfortunately, we can't run those for shipments that we weren't the broker on, but that is something that we can just do on the side. But yeah, your best option is just creating a report, and then going from there. Okay, so what do we do if we do not have Entry Summary as an option? That is an access issue, so you'll need to go to your Trade Account Owner, or potentially you might even need to go to the ACE Support desk to help with that. Okay, so I do not have Post Summary Correction status or liquidation status as choices in my ES 003 report. So this is where you would use that query add function.
So when you open the report, you'll go in and click the Design section at the top right, and then you'll go to the top left, where it says Query, and click the little Excel icon. And then you'll need to click and drag those options into your query field to be able to add those as columns. Can we see Post Summary Correction in importer role? Karina, I believe that's similar to what I was just talking about. So you have to go to Design and then go to the Query section, click on it, and then add that as a column. You can also, I believe, add that as a column through the side design aspect as well, but you'll want to put it over in the query aspect.
Also, if you run a couple of different reports, there will—it will show on some reports and not on others, unfortunately. So this is something where you're going to want to play around to see what you want to see. So how do you share across the organization? With this one, it depends on what you mean by organization. So if you mean across the people who have access to your ACE portal account, you would want to create a shared folder, and there's links to how to do that on the ACE training page. Or you'll want to schedule it and just email it out. So when you schedule it, you can put in email addresses of anyone within your organization. That would probably be the best option for that. Okay, can I cover how to run periodic monthly statement reports?
So Periodic Monthly Statement reports. So I'm going to hit Escape here. I'm going to stop sharing for just a second. Let me see if I can pop back to this other section. Let's see. So that will be in one of the reports that you can run. And your broker also should be able to file reports for you with some of these. I'm going to share this because a lot of these seem to be around this. Let's see, Share, and then we're going to share that one. Okay, so with the Periodic Monthly Statement report, this Rev 101 monthly statement overview seems to be the most popular report. But there should be a couple of other options in there too.
Or if you want to run one of the other reports and then go into the design function and add that in, you can add that in as well. Okay. Is it possible to schedule a monthly report and the ACE system automatically moves the dates forward each month? Yes, that should be in the scheduling section. You should be able to enter that you want it for previous month data. There should be an option in there for that. How do I run a monthly PMS report that shows what's going to be auto-debited for each of our freight forwarders? So again, that should be this monthly statement overview. I do believe that they don't finalize the actual statement details until around the fourth or fifth of the month.
So I know this is a really hot topic where people want this on the first of the month to know exactly what's happening. But unfortunately, based off the way that timing works with periodic monthly statement, it's usually not 100% solidified until about the fourth or fifth of the month. So this report right here should be super helpful. There are a couple of other duty payment reports, but that one, I think, is the most popular for that topic. So I've never been able to pull any data using the official notice of extension, suspension, and liquidation option. Only get results when I use courtesy notice. Why is this? So if you're running into an issue with that, it's interesting that you say that, because I have the opposite problem.
Mine doesn't show on the courtesy notice, but it always shows on the extension, suspension, and liquidation. If you are positive that you should have access to that, that's one where I would escalate with ACE Support because they should be able to help you to get that fixed, or there are times when the reports just break, and so that's where you need to escalate with them and let them know that there's some kind of an issue pulling that data. So manufacturer ID. I've noticed that different customs brokers create the ID differently, even if the supplier name and address is the same. How can I standardize the same ID across all customs brokers? So unfortunately, on that one, that's a communication with each broker individually. There's not really a way to force a specific MID for each broker within the ACE Portal.
I would say the most common way that I'm seeing that that's corrected is through a customs parts database that's sent to each broker, that has an additional column for the MID for each individual item. So can we change our company address in ACE, or do we need to request it through our broker? This is an area where I don't have access to address details. That's kind of one of those things where it's a little different from the broker side to the importer side. From what I can tell from reading up on the ACE portal, like, helpful tips site, I believe that has to be done through your broker, through a 5106 form. It's really straightforward. As long as they have a power of attorney from you, they can update the address.
They can also put a point of contact. That's a requirement now with the 5106, a point of contact, phone number, and email. So yeah. So that's typically the way that I see that. But again, that's one area where I don't have access, so if someone knows that and has access to that, that'd be great, but I'm fairly positive that that's kind of like an ACH debit request. It has to go straight through a form. Okay. A while ago, I received a request from our broker to add our item numbers to be available on ACE reports. I declined at the time, but I'm reconsidering. Do you know how I'd go about adding our item numbers to ACE? Actually, yes. I didn't add that to this because it can be a little bit technical.
I can talk to Alex, and we can add a job aid to how to do that to when we mail out the marketing materials. There is a way to do it. It's a little bit weird and kind of in the back end, but yes, there is a way to do it. It's not super common, but it can definitely be added. Okay. Can you again mention where I should go to set up bank items for refunds that will replace checks? So yes, that is... I'm gonna stop sharing here for a second. Let's see here. I don't know why I'm struggling today with this. There we go. Okay, stop sharing. That section can be found right. It's on kind of the main details page, so if you go from... There it is. Okay. And I will reshare.
Okay, so if you're looking for that ACH Refund Authorization, you're again, from that homepage, you're going to go to Accounts, Importer, and then click on the importer. If you have multiple IRS numbers, and I know some companies can have 20-30 IRS numbers under one umbrella with one ACE Portal, Customs did say that it's a good idea to email them, so that they can help you to update them all. Every once in a while, you get an officer who won't help with it exactly, but it's helpful, especially if you have a ton to update. And then within this, you're going to go to this...
I don't have access to this page, again, as a broker, but if you go to this ACH Refund Authorization section, this is where you can actually go in and type in all of your bank details, to get that updated for you. Okay. When I modify reports, the category I add usually ends up replacing one of the categories that was already there. Is there a way to prevent this from happening? I would have two questions for you: Are you modifying it before you save the report? Because if I remember correctly, if you do it after you've saved the report, it should just add the column.
If after you have saved and you're going into a pre-saved report in your personal folder and it's still replacing, then with that one, unfortunately, I just say reach out to ACE Support to help, because, there may be something tricky there that I'm missing, but I believe that that's, that's typically how it is. You can't do it sometimes, and ACE can be really finicky, so you can't do it just from, that, like, as you're initially running it, sometimes you have to save it first and then modify it. It's the same with the scheduling, otherwise it just breaks it. So sorry, I missed the detail of the difference between the HTS-ITC website and the HTS website.
So the difference with those two is that one of them just takes you directly to the HTS website, and then the other one, you search by HTS number, and it will call out the specific statistical quantities that are required. So if you receive a request from your broker for a net weight or piece count, well, piece count, you typically have. Probably one of my favorites for buttons is gross button lines. Don't ask me what that is, because I can't remember exactly off the top of my head, but you have to determine something called a line with the diameter of the button and calculate it out. It's a whole fancy thing. But things like that, if you need to know the census details, will show up in that HTS section on when you're searching by HTS.
So it's just another way to search. It's not anything too fancy outside of that. Okay. So the ES 002 report has the MPF per line, but the total amount per lines adds more than the maximum amount to pay. If there is a report where you can see the total amount of MPF paid in the cases where the maximum amount is paid for the entry. So we can maybe dig into that a little bit more. I haven't looked at that specifically. I do know that with a lot of Customs reports, there can be an MPF calculated, and then there's an MPF paid.
So, I would look to see in that design section if there's an actual MPF paid line, because I've seen this in reports before, and I know Expeditors specifically has reports that will calculate it that way, but I do believe ACE has those reports as well, where you just need to put in a different—there's a different MPF column that you need to add to the report. Okay. Can you confirm that Proxy Trade Account Owner s can add users? We are getting an error when trying to create a new user.
Hey, Katherine, just before you answer that, we are at time.
Oh, okay.
So if you, if you have the time to keep going through questions, great. Like we said at the beginning, everyone, if we don't get to your question, we will make sure that someone reaches out to you to answer this. But I'll leave it up to you, Katherine.
... Okay, I'm going to answer these next two really fast. So that first one, where you're unable to add Proxy Trade Account Owner s, ACE's own user—their own job aids say that you can. I would maybe go back and let them know that in the past, you've been able to as a Proxy Trade Account Owner , because that is a listed function of a Proxy Trade Account Owner . So I'm not sure why you wouldn't be able to now. This is probably another instance of where they've been breaking it. For those of you who've been around for a long time, you've—we've had the historic ACE Portal that was very challenging, and then this one is our new ACE Portal that's much better, but it still breaks quite a bit as they're fixing it.
So I would check back in on that, just to see if there's a way for them to fix that, because I would assume that's more of a system break, because they do list that as a specific function of a Proxy Trade Account Owner . And then this one came up a little bit ago, so I'm just going to cover this one really fast. They said that you can't update your address as an importer on this address page right here, so someone just tried that. So in that instance, you'll need to reach out to your broker. As long as they have a power of attorney for you, they can update your address using a 5106 form.
And then just know that when they enter that in, they'll need a mailing address, if you have, like, a physical location, you'll need that as well. And then they'll also need a name, a title, phone number, an email address to provide on that 5106 form, but they can pretty easily update that. So if you can't—if you need to update that address, I would reach out on that. And then there's just one more question. So I know we're a little bit over time, but I'm going to answer this one really fast. So can we continue to use our legacy user ID when we start with a new company, or does the Trade Control Administrator have to create a new user ID? I believe that they need to create...
You can still log in, but if you are not assigned to a company, so if the Trade Account Owner at your past company has removed you, then you won't be able to log in, even though you have a user ID already. So your user ID for the new company, I believe, will be similar or it'll be your new username for the new company. But yeah, it just depends, because typically your user ID is your email address, which is linked to your old company. So typically that doesn't work, but it just depends. So, okay, I think we've hit through all of the questions, so hopefully this was helpful for all of you. Again, we understand ACE Portal has not been the most useful thing over the past, but it's getting better and better over time.
So, thank you so much for attending. Thanks for all your questions, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.
Thank you, all.