Free tool
What did it actually cost per unit?
Freight, insurance, duty, port, clearing and detention arrive as shipment-level lump sums, weeks after the invoice. Somebody then has to decide which line each one belongs to — and that decision, not the arithmetic, is where the error lives. Put your own figures in below and this spreads them the way each charge is genuinely driven, then shows you the working.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. There is no account, no form and no file upload — the calculation runs in the page.
The lines on the shipment
What was on the container.
What was paid on top
The charges, as invoiced.
This tool does not compute duty. It is an input, taken from your bill of entry, and there is no HSN lookup behind it — see below for why not.
Illustrative figures to start with. Replace them with a shipment of your own; the page recalculates as you type.
Why the answer moves
Freight follows weight. Not value.
Value is the column every spreadsheet already has, so value is what most landed-cost workings spread everything by. It is right for insurance, duty and clearing, all of which really are charged on what the goods are worth. It is wrong for freight, port handling and the lorry, which are bought by weight — and getting it wrong makes a heavy cheap material look cheap and a light expensive one look expensive.
Both answers look completely ordinary on a screen. That is the whole problem: nothing about the wrong number announces itself, and a standard cost gets restated on the strength of it. The panel above prints the difference on your own figures rather than asking you to take it on trust.
| Charge | Spread by | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Freight | Gross weight | Ocean and air freight are bought by weight or volume, never by invoice value. |
| Insurance | Value | The premium is a percentage of what is being insured. |
| Duty | Value | Ad valorem, which is right for most tariff lines and wrong for specific-rate ones. |
| Port and terminal | Gross weight | Charged per tonne or per container. |
| CHA and clearing | Value | Usually a percentage of consignment value. |
| Inland carriage | Gross weight | A lorry is paid by weight. |
| Demurrage and detention | Gross weight | Follows the cargo that sat there — and is the one line that should have been zero. |
Where a basis is not recorded on every line, the calculation falls back — value, then weight, then quantity, then an even split — and says on the row which basis it used. A partly recorded measure is treated as unusable on purpose: three lines with weights and one without would otherwise allocate nothing to the fourth and make a real material look free.
Said before you ask
This does not work out your duty.
There is no HSN lookup here, and no BCD → surcharge → IGST cascade. That is a decision rather than an omission: SIAARU holds no tariff table, computes no duty, and the module this tool is a slice of takes duty as an amount recorded from a bill of entry. A calculator that produced a duty figure from a tariff code would be claiming a capability the product does not have — and never inventing a number is the commitment the whole thing is built on. Duty rates change, specific-rate lines are charged per tonne rather than ad valorem, and a calculator that is quietly wrong is worse than none.
Two more things it does not do, which the product does: it reads one shipment rather than every shipment, and it forgets everything the moment you close the tab. Doing this against every line of every consignment, against your standard costs, with the variance ranked by rupees, is LandedCost AI — one of the modules on the pricing page, sitting on the same engine as the rest.