Billions in Refundable Duties Are Just Sitting There
Here’s a fun fact most CFOs don’t love: U.S. companies pay over $100 billion in import duties every year. And while some of that’s recoverable through U.S. Customs’ duty drawback program, most of it never makes it back.
In fact, Customs refunds only $2–3 billion annually, even though $50 billion more is eligible but unclaimed every single year.
Why? Because one, duty drawback is historically a mess: siloed systems, manual data entry, mismatched documents, Excel gymnastics, and a generous dose of “we’ll get to that someday.” And second because the juice hasn’t been worth the squeeze – tariffs have not been anywhere near as high as they are now,
Here’s the twist: with new trade realities (Section 301 tariffs, the end of NAFTA, and more), this is no longer just an operational annoyance — it’s a major cash flow opportunity. And the kicker? You can go back five years and reclaim duties you already paid.
All you’ve to do is prove it. That’s where the trouble and the opportunity lies.
Why Duty Drawback Is Still an Untapped Opportunity
Let’s be honest. Most companies haven’t built their process around drawback optimization. Here’s how it tends to go:
- Imports come in and duties get paid
- Exports go out with their own shipping, sales, and documentation trail
- Someone in compliance is asked if a drawback claim can be filed
- A manual process begins using Excel and PDF to match by hand
Sometimes, companies outsource the process but that usually comes with a 15–20% cut of your refund, and the 3rd party still needs weeks (or months) to wrangle your data. And if your internal data is bad? Even they can’t help.
Meanwhile, millions of dollars are left on the table. Unclaimed. Undocumented. Unmatched.
Four Reasons You’re Not Getting Your Money Back
- Bad or Incomplete Data If you can’t prove the import matches the export you don’t get the refund. That’s the rule. No partial credit.
- Total Time to Refund Is Painfully Slow You might be waiting on your own data, your broker, or your third-party filer. Meanwhile, duties sit there, gathering dust instead of cash flow.
- Audit Risk Makes Everyone Skittish Filing an inaccurate or undocumented claim can trigger unwanted attention. Most teams would rather skip it than risk an audit — which is fair, but costly.
- Cash Flow Is Tied Up for No Good Reason You’ve already paid duties. The goods are long gone. So why wait 12 months (or more) to get it back?
How Duty Drawback is Done Today
For many organizations, the current duty drawback process often relies on manual tasks, siloed data, and other challenges that can include:
- Excel with manual entry and fuzzy VLOOKUPs
- PDFs from brokers that don’t quite match
- 3rd-party vendors who charge 15% and take 12 weeks
Even if you’re outsourcing, you still have an opportunity to accelerate the entire process by prepping the data before the vendor can act. If the internal chaos isn’t solved, they’re just billing you to clean it up.
What a Modern Drawback Process Actually Needs
To fix this process and get your money back you need a few core capabilities:
- Extract SAP and broker data (Alteryx has native + 3rd party connectors)
- Automate the matching logic between CBP 7501 forms, export invoices, and bills of lading
- Trigger workflows when exports occur, not months later
- Handle five years of back claims, because retroactive recovery = real money
- Log everything and maintain transparent, auditable workflows so if CBP comes calling, you’re ready
In short, you need automation. And more specifically, you need Alteryx.
Five Ways Alteryx Accelerates Duty Drawback Success
Extracts and Normalizes Data from SAP, Brokers, and PDFs Alteryx reads structured and semi-structured data from ERPs, broker feeds, and even messy PDFs. You can finally ditch the manual data prep and stop copying line items from scanned invoices.
Matches Import and Export Records with Custom Workflow Logic No more guessing. Alteryx automates the match between CBP 7501 entries and export invoices, validating quantities, values, and dates. Logic flows can be customized for unused, manufacturing, or substitution claims.
Automates Claim File Generation with Audit-Ready Outputs Need a full package to submit to CBP? Alteryx can generate it — complete with matched entries, proof of export, duty payments, and a full audit trail that won’t keep compliance up at night.
Accelerates Refund Cycles by Starting Matching on Export No more waiting for the end of the quarter. With automated triggers, Alteryx can kick off the claim process as soon as the goods leave the U.S. border. That’s how you get your money faster.
Empowers Customs Teams Without IT Bottlenecks Build it once, and your compliance team can run it monthly — or even weekly — without waiting on IT tickets or costly system integrations. It’s drag, drop, and deploy.
Don’t Leave Cash on the Table
Duty drawback is one of the most underused and high-ROI automation use cases in global trade today. The process has always been hard — but the costs of ignoring it have never been higher.
You can claim refunds going back five years. You can accelerate current refunds. You can avoid third-party fees. And most importantly, you can stop treating this as a “maybe” — and start treating it like the $50 billion opportunity it is.
Alteryx makes it possible — and you don’t have to wait.
Start with one workflow. Claim one refund. Build the foundation now. Then automate the process – from collecting the data, matching the duties to invoices, and even filling in the required forms – and keep the cash flowing.