Three documents, one shipment, and a bank that reads only the paper.

A forwarder I work with lost eleven days on a container of pumps.

The invoice said "electric pumps". The bill of lading said "pumps, electric". Same goods, same container, same shipment, two word orders, and the issuing bank refused the documents.

The buyer was not disputing anything. The goods were already sailing. Nobody thought the shipment was wrong.

The paper was wrong, and under a letter of credit the paper is what gets paid.

What the bank is actually doing

A letter of credit is a promise by a bank to pay against documents. Not against goods, not against delivery, not against the buyer being happy. The rulebook almost every bank applies is the ICC's UCP 600, and its logic is deliberately narrow: the bank examines the documents you present, decides whether they comply on their face, and pays or refuses on that basis alone.

It sounded unfair to me the first time somebody explained it. It is not unfair, it is the point. The bank has never seen your factory and is not going to inspect a container. The only thing it can check without leaving the office is whether the documents are internally consistent and match what the credit asked for.

So the question a document checker asks is never "did this shipment happen". It is "does this piece of paper say what the credit told me it would say".

Why the paperwork drifts apart

The three that travel together do different jobs, and that is exactly why they drift apart.

The commercial invoice is written by you and describes what you are charging for. It is a finance document and it tends to use the words your accounting system uses.

The packing list is written by whoever loaded the boxes. It describes cartons, weights and dimensions, and it tends to use warehouse language.

The bill of lading is issued by the carrier and is the only one of the three that is also a title document. Whoever holds the original can claim the cargo. Its description comes from the booking, which was often typed by a third party weeks before the invoice existed.

Three authors. Three vocabularies. Three different weeks.

The discrepancies are not carelessness. They are what happens when three people describe one shipment without ever reading each other's work, and nobody is asked to reconcile the three descriptions before a courier collects them.

The ones that actually come up

These are the refusals we see most often, in the order we see them. None of them is exotic.

Goods described differently. The invoice must describe the goods as the credit describes them. The other documents may use a general description, but it must not contradict the credit. "Pumps, electric" against "electric pumps" is the version of this that makes people angry, and it is still a refusal.

Late presentation. Documents have a deadline after the shipment date, and if the credit does not state one, twenty one days is the default under UCP 600. Miss it and the documents are stale, regardless of how correct they are.

The bill of lading is not clean. A notation that the cargo or packaging is damaged makes it a claused bill, and a credit almost always demands a clean one.

Weights and quantities that do not tie. Gross weight on the packing list against gross weight on the bill of lading, carton count against carton count. Two documents from two systems, and no one reconciled them before the courier collected.

Names and addresses. A trading name on one document and a registered name on another is enough. So is a missing suffix.

What a refusal costs you

Two things. Only one of them is money.

The money is the delay. The documents come back, you correct them, you present again, and the clock starts from that presentation rather than from the first one. On a shipment already at sea you are financing the cargo for the extra days out of your own working capital.

The second cost is that your position changes. Under a complying presentation the bank is obliged to pay. Under a discrepant one it is not, and you are now asking the buyer to waive the discrepancy. That is a request, not a right. A buyer who has changed their mind about the price now has a reason to reopen it.

This matters more for small exporters, because they have fewer places to go when the credit fails. The Asian Development Bank's 2025 survey of trade finance found 41% of applications from small and medium companies were rejected, against 40% from corporates, and put the total unmet demand at $2.5tn. A discrepancy is not the same thing as a rejected application, but it lands in the same place: the exporter carries the cargo and the cost while somebody decides.

What I could not establish

I wanted to publish a rate. What share of first presentations under letters of credit are refused for discrepancies?

The figure quoted around the industry sits somewhere between a half and three quarters, and it traces back to old ICC survey work rather than to a current published series.

I could not find a recent, dated, publicly downloadable number. So I am not printing one.

The honest version: refusals are common enough that experienced document checkers treat a first presentation as a draft, and I cannot give you the share.

If your bank publishes its own refusal rate, send it to me. I have not found one that does.

What I got wrong

For a long time I told people the fix was to be careful.

That is useless advice and I stopped giving it, because carefulness is not the failure. Three people write these documents at three different moments, and none of them is asked to read the other two, so the drift is built into the process rather than into anybody's attention span. The fix is a shared string of text, not more concentration.

Reading a refusal notice

When documents are refused, the bank has to tell you. The notice must say that it is refusing, list every discrepancy it is refusing for, and state what it is doing with the documents while it waits.

Two things follow, and both are worth knowing before you need them.

First, the list is closed. A bank that refuses for two discrepancies cannot come back later with a third from the same presentation. Read the list as the complete set of what has to be fixed.

Second, a single notice within the deadline is required, and the deadline is five banking days after presentation. A bank that misses it loses the right to say the documents do not comply. This is worth knowing precisely because nobody volunteers it.

Make them agree before the courier

The fix is boring. Write the goods description once, then copy it everywhere.

Take the wording from the credit itself, character for character, including the order of the words and the punctuation. Put it in the invoice. Give the same string to the forwarder for the booking, so it lands on the bill of lading. Give it to the warehouse for the packing list.

Then check the four things that travel across documents rather than inside one: the goods description, the carton count, the gross weight, and the names of the parties. Those four are where our own corrections cluster.

Do it before the courier, not after the refusal.

Correcting a document sitting on your own desk costs minutes. Correcting one that is already with a bank costs days, and those days are financed by you while the cargo sits somewhere expensive.