What every broker should do with TRE in the first 90 days

On 31 March 2026, HMRC replaced the paid MSS reports with TRE, the Trade Reporting and Extracting service. Declaration data that previously cost between £240 and £960 plus VAT per report, per trader, per year is now free and self-service through the Government Gateway. You can access four years of history across four report types, and as the declarant you can pull every declaration you have filed without requesting permission from a single client.

For most intermediaries, the challenge is no longer access. It is analysis: turning four years of declarations, across every client you file for, into something you can act on. That is where the value sits, and it is what this article is about. The plan below covers the first 90 days, whether you file as a customs broker, a freight forwarder, or a fast parcel operator.

Days 0 to 30: get the data

Register for the TRE service through your Government Gateway account, sign in on your own EORI, and request the declarant report. As the declarant, you receive every declaration you have filed, across all your importer clients, in a single file. No client permission is required, because this is your own filing data. In one case we have seen, a single declarant report covered more than 900 traders.

Pull four years across the three import reports: import header, import item, and import tax lines. There is no need to analyse anything at this stage; the priority is to bring the data together in one place.

A second route is worth noting for later. With a client's permission, you can request that trader's full record, including declarations other agents have filed on their behalf. This gives the trader's complete view, which helps when a client asks you to manage their whole customs position. For reviewing your own work, the declarant report is sufficient and needs no permission.

Days 31 to 60: review what you filed

Four years of declarations, across every client and several report types, runs to millions of rows. A spreadsheet will surface the obvious errors. It is far less likely to surface the patterns that matter at scale.

Five areas are worth examining:

1. Classification consistency. The same product filed under different commodity codes across clients, or across time.
2. Duty and VAT against expectation. Lines where the amount paid does not match the rate that applied at the time of filing.
3. Missed preferences. Goods that qualified for a trade agreement rate but paid the full rate.
4. Sanctions exposure. Declared parties that should have been screened.
5. Correction patterns. Entries that have already been amended, and what caused the amendment.

Reviewing millions of rows by hand is rarely practical. The realistic choice is to dedicate significant analyst time to the task, or to use a tool built to analyse declaration data at scale. Either way, the goal is the same: a prioritised list of filings worth a closer look, ranked by the duty or the risk involved.

Days 61 to 90: build the evidence and act

By this stage you have a baseline. There are three useful things to do with it.

First, establish an error and correction record. The Voluntary Standard for Customs Intermediaries, in development with BSI, is expected to ask intermediaries to demonstrate measurable error rates, post-clearance review, and service quality. Building that record now, from real filings, means the history is in place when the standard is published.

Second, open a client conversation. Where a client's data shows a reclaim opportunity or a recurring error, share it. A report that says 'we have reviewed your filings, and here is what we found' turns post-clearance review from an internal cost into a billable advisory service.

Third, set a routine. Decide which checks you run each month, for which clients, and who owns the output. Ninety days gives you a baseline; the lasting value comes from running the review regularly.

The opportunity

Free customs data has been widely discussed across the industry since March. Most of that commentary explains that the data is now available. The more valuable step is acting on it: turning declarations into corrections, reclaim, and evidence. Intermediaries who do this in the first 90 days will hold an error record, a reclaim list, and a set of client conversations grounded in their own data.

Barbourne Brook built CAT360 because reviewing declarations at this scale is difficult to do manually across a book of clients. If you would like to see what your own filings contain, you can book a TRE review. We load your declaration data and review it with you, line by line.