Docyield's certificate of origin parser reads a certificate — scanned, photographed, or supplied as a PDF — and returns its trade details as structured data. A certificate of origin attests to the country in which goods were produced, and customs authorities and importers rely on it to apply the right tariffs and trade preferences. The parser captures the certificate number, the exporter and consignee, the countries of origin and destination, the transport details, the issue date and issuing authority, and the goods covered, exporting them as JSON, CSV, or Excel.
These certificates come in many forms — a chamber of commerce template, a preferential certificate under a free-trade agreement, or an exporter's own letterhead — and the wording shifts between them. The party who ships the goods may be the "exporter" on one form and the "consignor" on another; the goods may be listed by HS code, by description, or both. Rather than relying on a single layout, Docyield reads each certificate by meaning, so the exporter, consignee, origin, and goods land in the right fields whatever the issuing body called them.
What a certificate of origin states
A certificate of origin is a declaration, usually issued or stamped by a chamber of commerce or another authorised body, that the goods in a shipment originate from a stated country. It identifies the exporter who is shipping the goods and the consignee who is receiving them, names the country of origin and the country of destination, and often records the means of transport or route the shipment takes.
It also carries the administrative anchors that make it official: a certificate number, an issue date, and the issuing authority. And it lists the goods — the items the certificate covers — frequently with HS or tariff codes that classify each product for customs. Together these fields are what a customs broker or importer needs to clear a shipment and claim any origin-based duty treatment.
Why structured extraction beats raw OCR and manual entry
Trade documents move in volume and under time pressure, and a certificate of origin is rarely the only paper in a shipment file — it travels with invoices, packing lists, and bills of lading. Re-keying the exporter, consignee, origin, and every HS code by hand is slow, and a mistyped HS code or a swapped origin can hold up a customs clearance.
Plain OCR reads the text but leaves the structure to you, returning the exporter and consignee tangled together and the goods as loose lines with no clear link between a description and its HS code. Structured extraction rebuilds it: the parties go into named fields, and each item comes back with its description, code, quantity, and origin, so the certificate's data slots cleanly into a customs or trade system.
Who uses a certificate of origin parser
- Freight forwarders and customs brokers capturing origin certificates into clearance systems.
- Importers and exporters building trade-document records for each shipment.
- Trade-compliance teams checking declared origin and HS codes against shipment files.
- Logistics providers reconciling certificates against invoices and packing lists.
- Finance and procurement teams recording country of origin for sourcing and duty purposes.
- Developers adding trade-document capture to a logistics or compliance app via the API.
Goods, HS codes, and per-item origin
The goods are returned as a nested list, and it is worth explaining how each one comes back. Every item is a self-contained record: a description of the goods, the HS or tariff code that classifies them, the quantity, and the country of origin for that specific item. Exported to CSV or Excel, each item becomes a row you can sort by HS code or group by origin, which is far easier to work with than a block of text on the certificate.
Recording origin at the item level matters because a single certificate can cover goods from more than one origin. Keeping a per-item origin alongside the document-level country of origin preserves that nuance instead of flattening every line to one country. Where a line gives no HS code, the code field comes back empty rather than guessed. Quantities are captured as numbers so a shipment's totals can be summed directly, and the exporter and consignee are kept as distinct parties rather than merged, since a single shipment commonly moves between two businesses that a customs system tracks separately.
Accuracy, stamps, and review
No parser reads every certificate perfectly, and these documents bring their own challenges — official stamps, embossed seals, and signatures overlapping the printed text. Accuracy is highest on clean, flat scans; a certificate photographed at an angle, or one where a stamp covers part of an HS code, is where a value can be misread, and a sharper image consistently helps.
Where a field is genuinely absent — a certificate that omits the transport route, for instance — it comes back empty rather than filled with a plausible guess, because a wrong origin or a fabricated HS code on a customs document carries real cost. The parser keeps the source certificate beside the extracted fields, so verifying the HS codes and origins takes only a moment. This describes data extraction only and is not customs, trade, or legal advice.
Output formats, API, and batch
Each parse exports as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the same result. JSON suits a customs or trade-system integration; CSV and Excel suit a compliance worklist of shipments and HS codes; XML fits an older logistics import. The free tool handles one certificate at a time.
When certificates arrive with every shipment, the Docyield API and batch dashboard run the same extraction at scale, return results by webhook, and let you apply your own checks — for example flagging any item whose HS code is missing. The field names are identical between the free tool and the API.
What the certificate of origin parser extracts
Each certificate is returned against a fixed schema. Fields the document does not show come back empty rather than guessed. The goods are a nested list, one record per item.
- Certificate number
- The number identifying the certificate.
- Exporter
- The exporter or consignor shipping the goods.
- Consignee
- The party receiving the goods.
- Country of origin
- The declared country of origin for the shipment.
- Country of destination
- The country the goods are bound for.
- Transport details
- The means of transport or route, where stated.
- Issue date
- The date the certificate was issued.
- Issuing authority
- The chamber of commerce or authority that issued it.
- Items
- A nested list of goods covered. Each item holds a description, an HS or tariff code, a quantity, and the country of origin for that item.
How to convert a certificate of origin to JSON, CSV, or Excel
- 1Upload your certificate — drop a flat scan, photo, or PDF onto the box above, or choose a file.
- 2Wait a few seconds while Docyield reads the document and separates the parties, origins, and goods.
- 3Review the structured result, checking the HS codes and origins against the original.
- 4Pick your output tab — JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML.
- 5Copy the result or download the file, ready for your customs, trade, or logistics system.
Frequently asked questions
Processing documents at scale?
Batch upload, an extraction API, and webhooks for 100+ documents a month.