Free Packing List Generator

What a packing list is

A packing list is the shipment's inventory. It states what is inside each package, how many packages there are, what each one weighs net and gross, and how much space they occupy — and it says nothing at all about money. That omission is deliberate, not an oversight. The commercial invoice carries the values; the packing list carries the physical facts, so it can be handed to a customs inspector, a terminal tally clerk, a warehouse supervisor or a marine surveyor without disclosing what your buyer paid.

It is the document people open the boxes against. A customs officer who selects your container for examination works from this list: they pick line 7, find the cartons the list says hold line 7, and count them. The consignee's warehouse runs the same exercise on arrival — receiving goods is a reconciliation, not a discovery. If the list says 1,600 cartons and 1,594 land, the claim against the carrier or the cargo insurer starts here, because this is the only document that ever said how many there were supposed to be.

No convention makes a packing list compulsory the way SOLAS Chapter VI makes the VGM compulsory. It survives because every other party demands it. Customs authorities want a package-level breakdown before they release the goods; letters of credit name it in the required documents almost without exception; and no forwarder builds a stow plan, a dangerous-goods manifest or a cold-chain plan from an invoice. In practice, an export shipment without a packing list is an export shipment that stops at the first counter it reaches.

What has to be on it

A number, a date, and the references that tie it into the set. A packing list is never read alone — it is read next to the commercial invoice, the transport document and, under a credit, the LC itself. Give it its own number, date it, and print the commercial invoice number on it. UCP 600 Article 14(d) requires that data in a presented document not conflict with data in any other stipulated document; the reference line is what tells the bank's checker which invoice this list is not supposed to conflict with.

Package-level content on every line. Each line needs the description of goods, how much is on it (a quantity and its unit of measure), how it is packed (the number of packages and the package type), and the net and gross weight. Net excludes packaging; gross includes it. Quantity and packages are two different facts — 24,000 shirts travel in 1,200 cartons, and it is the 1,200 that the bill of lading counts and a carrier caps its liability against — so the document states them in two columns, not one. Goods shipped loose or in bulk have a quantity but no package count, and that column is left as a dash rather than restating the tonnage as a package tally. Per-package dimensions give the volume column, and the CBM total is what your forwarder checks the freight charge against when the shipment is rated on measurement rather than weight.

An HS code per line, matching the invoice. The destination customs classifies on the code and not on your prose. The WCO Harmonized System is standardised to six digits internationally, with the digits beyond that set nationally — so the first six on your packing list, your invoice and the import declaration all have to be the same six. Two documents describing one pallet of oranges under two different codes is, at best, a query that holds the container while somebody answers it.

Marks and numbers, container numbers, and seals. Marks and numbers are the writing on the outside of the box — the only mechanism that matches a physical package to a line on paper, which is why they belong on the list verbatim rather than paraphrased. Container numbers follow ISO 6346: a four-letter owner code ending in U for a freight container, six digits and a check digit. Seal numbers matter more than they look: your consignee and their broker compare the seal on this list against the seal on the bill of lading, and a mismatch means the box was opened somewhere between your packhouse and their gate. Give ports with their UN/LOCODE — EGALY, NLRTM — because that five-character code is what the carrier's systems and the customs filings key on.

How it reconciles against the rest of the pack

Against the commercial invoice: same goods, same lines, same order — different columns. The invoice adds price and value; the packing list adds packages, weights and volume. UCP 600 Article 14(e) allows the description of goods on documents other than the commercial invoice to be stated in general terms, provided it does not conflict with the description in the credit. That is permission to be brief. It is not permission to differ. If your invoice says "fresh navel oranges, class I" and your packing list says "fruit", a strict checker can and will call that a conflict.

Against the bill of lading: the carrier's document states a gross weight and a package count, and those figures came from what you declared. Customs at both ends compares them to your list. They should agree. Where they cannot agree exactly — the carrier rounds, or the B/L shows two containers where your list shows 1,600 cartons — the two must at least be reconcilable line by line. The "said to contain" clause on a bill of lading protects the carrier from your description; it does not protect you from a customs officer who finds your totals three tonnes apart.

Against the VGM: the gross weight on a packing list and the SOLAS Verified Gross Mass are not the same number, and copying one into the other is the mistake this document exists to expose. Packing-list gross is cargo plus its own packaging. VGM is all of that, plus dunnage and lashing, plus the container's tare weight — which is typically 2,200–4,000 kg on a dry box. This document prints tare, cargo gross and VGM side by side in the container table for exactly that reason: cargo gross is derived as VGM minus tare, so if that derived figure does not land close to the gross weight you totalled above it, one of your two documents is wrong before the container has left the yard.

Mistakes that cost money

Entering the line weight where the form asks for the per-unit weight. On goods counted in pieces, this document multiplies the weight you give by the quantity — so a per-unit weight typed as the whole line total overstates the shipment by the piece count. The document now defuses the worst version of this itself: when the unit is a mass (KG, MT) the per-unit weight is definitional — one kilogram weighs one kilogram — so it derives the weight and ignores what you type, and the old fifteen-million-kilogram declaration can no longer be entered at all. But on a line of 24,000 shirts, "net weight per unit" still means one shirt — not the carton, and not the container. Read the label before you type the number.

Totals that do not add up to the containers. The commonest version: a list that totals 19,040 kg gross while the two containers on the same page carry VGMs implying 23,000 kg of cargo. Somebody typed cargo weight into the VGM column, or forgot the tare. Either way the document contradicts itself in print, and the first person to notice will not be you.

Describing goods the way your warehouse describes them. "Model A-3, blue" is a stock code, not a description of goods. Customs cannot classify it, the bank cannot match it to the credit, and the consignee's receiving clerk cannot confirm it. The description on the packing list has to be recognisable as the same goods named on the invoice, and both have to survive translation into the language of the destination customs.

Issuing the list before the container is packed. A packing list written from the sales order describes what you intended to ship. If the packhouse loaded 1,594 cartons because six were rejected at the grading line, the list is now a false statement about a physical fact — and it is the statement the carrier's bill of lading, the customs entry and the insurance claim will all be built on. Fix the list, not the shipment.

Leaving seals off, or filling them in later from memory. The seal number is the single cheapest piece of evidence you will ever put on a document. It is what lets you say the container that arrived is the container you closed. Read it off the seal at the moment you close the door, and put the same string on the packing list, the bill of lading instructions and nothing else.

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