Question 1

Do I have to replace my TMS?

Accepted Answer

No. StarShipper reads the documents and pushes structured data into the system you already run. There are seven delivery destinations: CargoWise (Universal XML over eAdaptor, with the source files attached as eDocs), Expedient, Xero (extracted invoices as purchase bills), Google Sheets, SAP, a nominated email address (a NEW JOB CSV), and custom webhooks (JSON to any endpoint, with Slack URLs formatted as Block Kit). TradeWindow is supported as a download rather than an automatic route. Your jobs and declarations stay where they are today.

Question 2

Can I forward documents straight from Outlook?

Accepted Answer

Yes, and that is how most documents arrive. Your workspace has a General inbox with its own address, something like abc123@inbound.starshipper.io. Forward the carrier's pre-alert, the invoice, the packing list, all of it. Attachments are stored on arrival and queued for extraction, then routed to the right document type and delivered to whichever integrations you have configured. Attachment types the pipeline cannot read are skipped, and so is any file identical to one your organisation already holds.

Question 3

What file formats can StarShipper read?

Accepted Answer

PDF, Excel (XLSX and XLS), Word (DOCX), CSV, XML, JSON, plain text, and JPG or PNG images, up to 10MB a file. The same list applies wherever a file goes in: dragged into the app, forwarded to your inbox address, or dropped into the demo on the website. Structured files are parsed directly, so the values are copied straight out of the source file. If one will not parse into usable data it falls back to AI extraction rather than failing. PDFs and photos go through AI extraction from the start. 25 document types are configured out of the box, and you can add your own with a custom extraction schema.

Question 4

Does it cope with scanned documents?

Accepted Answer

Yes. StarShipper checks the quality of a PDF's embedded text layer first and uses it where it is good, which is both faster and exact. Pages that come back sparse or image-only go to Claude Vision one page at a time, so a 30-page B/L pack with two scanned pages only pays for OCR on those two. A photograph works the same way. Container numbers get extra work, because OCR confuses F with T and 0 with 6 often enough to matter: known confusion patterns are corrected, the ISO 6346 check digit is recomputed, and awkward cases go back to the model to re-read the specific characters. Every correction is logged with what changed and why.

Question 5

What happens when the extraction gets a field wrong?

Accepted Answer

You fix it on the review screen and the field re-validates as you type. Nothing dispatches on its own unless two gates both pass: every extracted field cleared its confidence check with no validation errors, which is the Ready status, and cross-document reconciliation found no discrepancy against the other documents on the shipment. Anything short of that waits in Needs Review until a person looks at it. Where the real problem is upstream, a poor scan or the wrong document type, you can re-extract the document instead of retyping the fields.

Question 6

How does StarShipper know which shipment a document belongs to?

Accepted Answer

It matches on consignment identity: booking number, house B/L number, and the PO, invoice or reference numbers carried on the document. Conveyance keys are treated differently. A master B/L, a container number, or a vessel and voyage resolve a consolidation rather than a single shipment, because several house bills can share one box and hundreds share a vessel. When nothing matches, the document lands in the Unassigned tab with a count on the notification bell, and you pick the shipment yourself.

Question 7

What if the same document arrives twice?

Accepted Answer

StarShipper hashes the contents of every incoming file and checks it against the documents your organisation already holds. An upload that duplicates one is rejected and names the file it matches. A duplicate email attachment is skipped quietly, which is what you want when a carrier copies the same arrival notice to three of your addresses. The check is on the bytes, so a second scan of the same piece of paper is a genuinely different file and will come through as a new document.

Question 8

Does StarShipper lodge customs declarations?

Accepted Answer

No, it prepares them. From the documents on a shipment it renders a pre-filled N10 or N20 with a field-by-field readiness check, alongside a structured export you can carry into your ICS software. Lodgement stays with the licensed broker, in the system you lodge from today. That rule holds across the product: AI output is a suggestion for a qualified person to check, and StarShipper makes no regulatory submission by itself.

Question 9

How is my document allowance counted?

Accepted Answer

One document costs one credit, whatever the format and however many pages it runs to. A 40-page container manifest and a one-page invoice cost the same. When the monthly allowance is used up, files still arrive and are stored, and they show as Awaiting Credits: extraction is paused rather than failed, and it resumes when the month rolls over or the plan changes. Nothing is dropped while you sort the plan out.

Question 10

Is my data used to train AI models?

Accepted Answer

No. Document content goes to Anthropic for extraction, HS classification and document Q&A, and to OpenAI for the embeddings behind document search. Neither provider trains on data submitted through their API, and we do not train models on your documents either. Nothing from your organisation is used to improve extraction for anyone else. The full breakdown of what each provider sees is on the AI governance page.

Question 11

Who can see my organisation's documents?

Accepted Answer

Only the people you invite, each holding one of three roles: owner, admin, or member. Every query that reads or writes your data is scoped to your organisation at the application layer, and that scoping is verified by a dedicated suite of automated cross-tenant tests that run on every change. Database row-level security policies sit behind it as a backstop against direct database access. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest (AES-256-GCM for sensitive fields). StarShipper is an Australian company and operates under the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988. You can delete documents from your dashboard at any time.

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