The commercial invoice,
field by field.

The meaning of a commercial invoice is narrower than the word invoice suggests: it is the seller's record of a sale of goods, written for customs rather than for accounts payable. It is the document a customs administration reads to answer three questions: what are these goods, what are they worth, and where do they come from. Everything downstream — the tariff classification, the rate of duty, the tariff treatment, the tax — is built on the answers.

That is why the required contents are set by the country the goods are entering, not by the seller. A perfectly good invoice for an accounting system can be an unusable invoice at a border, because the accounting system never needed a country of origin, a unit of measure, a statement of who paid the freight, or a description a stranger could classify.

Four documents travel with a shipment and get confused with each other constantly. They are not interchangeable and a customs broker will ask for the right one by name.

For merchandise entering the United States, 19 CFR 141.86(a) sets out eleven items every commercial invoice must carry. The regulation is short, old and almost never read by the people filling in the invoice, which is why the same handful of omissions come back week after week.

Two further paragraphs matter as much as the list itself. 19 CFR 141.86(d) requires the invoice and all attachments to be in English, or to have an accurate English translation attached with enough information to examine the goods and determine duties. And 19 CFR 141.86(f) puts the cost of missing weights and measures on the consignee: where a weight, gauge or measure needed to assess duty is not on the invoice, the expense of obtaining it is borne by the consignee before the goods are released.

CBSA Memorandum D1-4-1 sets the Canadian invoice requirement, and paragraph 2 is the part worth reading carefully. For all commercial shipments entering Canada, except those described in paragraph 4, CBSA requires, in English or French, one of three things.

Read that list again and notice what it does not say. It does not say a Canada Customs Invoice is mandatory above any dollar figure. A commercial invoice that carries every item in Appendix A satisfies the requirement at any value. Form CI1 exists because it guarantees nothing has been left out, not because CBSA insists on its layout.

The CAD 2,500 figure that circulates as a CI1 threshold comes from paragraph 4, which is about something else entirely: when commercial invoices or other validating documents can be used to support the declared value of goods. That applies where the value for duty does not exceed CAD 2,500, where the increased value of returned Canadian goods does not exceed CAD 2,500, where the goods qualify for unconditional duty-free entry regardless of selling price, or where they qualify under tariff item 9810.00.00.00.

Two more paragraphs are worth knowing before an invoice is designed. Paragraph 9 says CBSA will not review or approve commercial invoices or privately printed customs invoices — there is no pre-clearance of a format, and the responsibility for completeness sits with the importer or owner. Paragraph 7 gives the importer, owner or agent seven days from the date of a request to produce supporting documentation, extendable at the discretion of the Regional Trade Director.

Appendix A of Memorandum D1-4-1 explains how to complete each field of form CI1 or the equivalent commercial invoice. What follows is that list with the practical consequence of each field added, since the memorandum tells you what to write but not what it costs to write it badly.

CBSA documents fields 22 to 25 as a single block rather than individually, because they are all valuation adjustments and the detail sits in Memorandum D13-4-7, Adjustments to the Price Paid or Payable.

More shipments are delayed by the description of goods than by any other field, and the reason is a mismatch of purpose. The shipper writes a description that identifies the goods to somebody who already knows what they are. Customs needs a description that classifies the goods to somebody who has never seen them.

A part number identifies. It does not classify. Neither does a brand name, a model code, an internal SKU, or the word that the industry uses casually. The test is simple: could a customs officer, holding nothing but this invoice, find the tariff heading? If not, the description is short of what the rule asks for.

CBSA's Appendix A asks for a general description in commercial terms together with a proper identifying description — style or code numbers, size, dimensions — as known in the country of production. US regulation asks for the name each item is known by, its grade or quality, and the marks and symbols under which it is sold to the trade in the country of exportation. Both want the same thing said two ways: what is it made of, what is it for, and what is it called in trade.

Duty is not charged on the number at the bottom of the invoice. It is charged on the value for duty, which starts from the price paid or payable between the vendor and the purchaser and is then adjusted for things that belong in the value and things that do not. In Canada those adjustments run through section 48 of the Customs Act; in the United States the parallel concept is transaction value.

The practical consequence for whoever types the invoice is that the total is not enough. Every charge has to be visible and labelled, and the invoice has to say whether each one is already inside the total or sitting outside it. Form CI1 does this with fields 23 and 24 — amounts included in field 17, and amounts not included in field 17 — which is a cleaner way of handling it than most commercial invoice templates manage.

Four categories catch people out repeatedly.

Origin is where goods were grown, produced or manufactured, and each article has to have been significantly transformed in that country into the form in which it is exported. Where the goods were bought, where they were warehoused, and where the truck picked them up are all separate questions, and none of them answers the origin question.

Appendix A puts the limit plainly: operations such as packaging, splitting and sorting may not be sufficient to confer origin. Goods manufactured in one country, consolidated in a warehouse in another and shipped from a third originate in the first.

Declaring origin on the invoice is required, but it is not a preferential claim. A claim for CUSMA treatment rests on a certification of origin carrying the prescribed data elements, completed by the exporter, the producer or the importer, and it is a separate document from the invoice. CBSA waives the proof of origin requirement for commercial importations not exceeding CAD 3,300 — but the origin declared on the invoice still has to be right, and a waiver of proof is not a waiver of accuracy.

Getting this wrong is expensive in a way that is easy to underestimate, because origin now drives more than the duty rate. It determines whether a trade remedy applies, whether a quota bites, what marking the goods need, and whether the preferential rate claimed was ever available.

The rules that let low-value shipments move on little more than a manifest have narrowed sharply, and the United States has effectively closed that route. Anyone still operating on the assumption that a USD 800 parcel clears itself is working from a rulebook that no longer exists.

The duty-free de minimis administrative exemption at 19 U.S.C. 1321(a)(2)(C) has been suspended. For merchandise arriving through any mode other than the international postal network, an interim final rule effective 24 June 2026 requires informal or formal entry procedures, with informal entry under 19 CFR Part 143 Subpart C as the ordinary route. A parallel rule covers the postal network, with a new postal informal entry process effective 24 July 2026 under which filers transmit shipment data and duties to CBP monthly. Merchandise subject to quotas, antidumping or countervailing duties, or partner government agency requirements must use formal entry.

Entry procedures mean entry data, and entry data means a commercial invoice carrying the contents at 19 CFR 141.86. In practice a great deal of e-commerce freight that never needed a real invoice now needs one.

Canada's thresholds are lower and have not changed, but they are three separate figures that get conflated constantly.

Almost none of the invoices that cause trouble are fraudulent. They are ordinary invoices written by somebody with no reason to know what a customs officer needs, and they fail in a small number of predictable ways.

The last one on this list is worth more attention than it usually gets. The commercial invoice and the bill of lading are prepared by different people, often in different systems, and nobody compares them before the truck leaves. The border is where they get compared.