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User GuideWarehouse Audit File

Warehouse Audit File

The Warehouse Audit File is a standardised monthly stock audit report that Dutch Customs requires from chain procedure participants. It contains every credit, drawdown, and adjustment in your warehouse stock ledger for one calendar month, plus opening and closing balances and the full goods characteristics for every product.

Borderbolt generates the Warehouse Audit File directly from the stock ledger — there is nothing to configure beforehand. You pick a past calendar month, set a download password, and Borderbolt builds the audit file for you in the background.

This page walks you through when you need to produce a Warehouse Audit File, how to create one, what goes inside it, the validation errors you might run into, and how to submit the file to Dutch Customs.

When you need to produce one

You must produce a Warehouse Audit File every month if you participate in the chain procedure. Other warehouse permit holders can produce one voluntarily — for example for internal audit purposes — but it is not required.

The report covers exactly one calendar month. You cannot produce a report for a partial month, for multiple months, or for a month that has not yet ended.

Creating a new report

  1. Go to Inventory → Warehouse Audit File in the left sidebar.
  2. Click + New report.
  3. Pick the declarant the report is for. This determines which warehouse permits and stock buckets are included.
  4. Pick the year and month the report should cover. The form defaults to the previous calendar month, which is the most common choice.
  5. Set a download password for the audit archive. The password rules are:
    • At least 12 characters
    • At least one uppercase letter
    • At least one lowercase letter
    • At least one digit
    • At least one of: ! @ # $ % ^ & * The password complexity indicator next to the field shows you in real time which rules are still missing.
  6. Click Generate.

Borderbolt queues the generation in the background. You can leave the page and come back later, or wait on the report detail page where the status updates as the run progresses.

The download password is shown to you exactly once, on the report detail page right after generation. Save it in your password manager immediately. Borderbolt does not store the plain password and you cannot recover it later — if you lose it you will need to regenerate the report with a new password.

What goes inside the report

The Warehouse Audit File is a password-protected archive that contains a structured set of stock ledger extracts:

  • Profile and reference data — your organisation’s identity, the users who touched the ledger during the month, the currencies and units of measure that appear in the data, and the calendar month the report covers.
  • Stock movements — every credit (incoming stock), drawdown (outgoing stock), and manual adjustment that happened during the month, with quantities, dates, and the user who triggered each movement.
  • Period balances — opening and closing quantities for every product at every warehouse location.
  • Product characteristics — commodity code, country of origin, customs status, chain procedure flag, batch description, and warehouse permit number for every product.
  • Movement characteristics — the type of each movement and, where applicable, the customs value of the underlying declaration.
  • Associated documents — for every movement, the link back to the originating declaration, including the registration reference, customs reference, invoice number, and transport document number.
  • Control totals — a summary count of every section, used by Dutch Customs to verify the file was not truncated in transit.

You do not need to inspect the contents yourself — Dutch Customs reads the file directly. But if you want to spot-check, the Warehouse Audit File detail page in Borderbolt shows the control totals for every section so you can confirm at a glance that the run picked up the expected number of movements and products.

Downloading the archive

When the run finishes, the status changes to Ready and a green Download button appears on the report detail page. Click it to stream the password-protected archive to your computer.

The archive name follows the convention {EORI}_001_NL_{year}_ADCS_{month}.zip, where:

  • {EORI} is the declarant’s EORI number
  • 001 is the department number (it increments if you produce more than one report for the same declarant in the same month)
  • {year} is the four-digit year
  • {month} is the two-digit month

For example: NL123456789_001_NL_2026_ADCS_03.zip for March 2026.

Submitting the report to Dutch Customs

Borderbolt does not submit the Warehouse Audit File to Dutch Customs for you. After downloading the archive, you upload it to Dutch Customs through their file transfer service in your browser. Use the password you saved when you generated the report.

The submission channel is operated by Dutch Customs and is outside Borderbolt — refer to the Dutch Customs portal for the upload URL and credentials.

Validation errors

Before Borderbolt writes any data into the audit file, it runs a set of business rule checks against your stock ledger. If any check fails, the run is marked Failed and the validation errors appear on the report detail page. You will need to fix the underlying ledger data and then click Regenerate to try again.

The most common validation errors are:

  • Missing commodity code — a stock bucket in the report period has no commodity code. Edit the bucket in Inventory and add the code.
  • Invalid country of origin — a lot has a country of origin that is not a valid two-letter ISO country code. Edit the lot and correct it.
  • Balance mismatch — the opening balance plus all movements during the month does not equal the closing balance for some product/location pair. This indicates a data integrity issue in the ledger that needs to be investigated before the report can be produced.
  • Missing characteristics — a product appears in the report period but has no commodity-code or country-of-origin characteristic attached. Edit the source data and try again.

Regenerating a report

If a report fails validation, or if you need to produce the same report again with a new password, click Regenerate on the report detail page. Borderbolt creates a new run with the same declarant, year, and month, and prompts you for a fresh password. The new run gets its own department number so the previous run is preserved for your records.

One report per month

The Warehouse Audit File covers exactly one calendar month. There is no way to produce a multi-month or partial-month report. If you need historical coverage, generate one report per month.

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