Another element of the bill of lading is the date. In foreign trade contracts and letters of credit, the delivery date is stipulated, generally expressed as “Last Shipment Date”. This date is measured by the “Onbord Date” on the bill of lading.
In foreign trade practice, delayed delivery is commonplace. If the goods cannot be delivered before the last shipment date, it will cause a relatively serious breach of contract. If it is a letter of credit, the customer can refuse to pay, or use this as an excuse to ask for a price reduction as compensation. Even if the customer does not mind, the bank will deduct the money for this discrepancy.
However, if the delay is not long, only a few days, as long as the freight forwarder is willing to help, it can be solved flexibly to avoid losses.
One of the methods is to fictitious date. For example, the original stipulation is August 8 as the last shipment date, but the actual delay is August 15 before shipment. But if the freight forwarder is willing to indicate “shipped on August 8” on the bill of lading, there will be no problem with the documents on the surface – since foreign trade is a transaction based on documents, there will naturally be no problem. This practice of backdating the date is called “Ante Dated B/L”.
The second method is to issue the bill in advance. Under the practice of backdating the bill of lading, the date is certainly no problem, but if the bill of lading is issued on August 15 according to the normal procedure, plus the time for document delivery, it is very likely to exceed the time limit for presentation of documents allowed by the letter of credit. The solution is not to wait for the ship to leave, but to issue the bill of lading in advance after confirming that it can be boarded for the bank to present the bill. This practice is called an advanced bill of lading (Advanced B/L).
As a result, although the deadline is set on the 8th, the ship is not boarded until the 15th, but the bill of lading marked on the 8th is still obtained in time.
Obviously, this is “fraud”. However, if the customer agrees to this operation, the exporter avoids risks such as bank deductions without any substantial losses to the customer, and everyone is happy. Therefore, backdating and pre-borrowing bills of lading are very common in practice. However, sometimes under CNF/CIF terms, because the freight forwarder is willing to cooperate, some exporters use this method to solve the problem of late delivery without the customer’s consent, which is deceptive.