Export incentives are rarely missed through ignorance. They are missed through process.
Why they slip
The claim sits between departments. Operations has the shipping documents. Accounts has the ledger. Neither owns the filing calendar, so it belongs to whoever remembers.
Add a deadline that is not monthly — so it never becomes routine — and the outcome is predictable.
What is usually available
RoDTEP, which remits embedded duties and taxes not otherwise refunded. Rates are notified by tariff line, which means the classification matters as much as the filing.
Duty drawback, where applicable, on the customs duty component of inputs.
State-level incentives, which vary considerably and are the most commonly overlooked of the three because they do not appear in any central checklist.
The classification problem
More claims are reduced by wrong classification than by late filing. The tariff line determines the rate, and product descriptions written by the operations team for shipping purposes are not always the descriptions that map cleanly to a tariff heading.
Reviewing classification once, properly, is usually worth more than tightening the filing process — and it applies retrospectively to what can still be claimed.
The other half: landed cost
There is a second problem that lives next to this one.
Most manufacturers know their factory cost per unit. Considerably fewer know their landed cost — factory cost plus freight, insurance, duty, handling, and the incentive received back.
Until that number exists per SKU, product profitability is an estimate. And when we build it for the first time, the ranking usually changes. Products believed to be the best performers turn out to carry the highest freight-to-value ratios; quiet products with light logistics turn out to be the profitable ones.
What to do about it
Audit what was claimable across the last several periods against what was actually claimed. That gap is often recoverable and it funds the rest of the work.
Then give the filing calendar a named owner with a date, and build landed cost per SKU once so pricing decisions have something real underneath them.
