The compliance record
is the product.
Your clients are paying for proof that the right thing happened, to the right goods, on the right date. That proof is currently spread across a platform, an inbox, and a spreadsheet nobody wants to own. We build the layer that holds it in one place, and the code is yours when it ships.
- 100%
- Source and IP yours
- $0
- Monthly licence fees
- 15 min
- Your migration effort
- 30 min
- Teardown, free, no pitch
CARM moved the liability. The tooling did not move with it.
As of 1 January 2026, a customs broker's business number can no longer be used to release or account for commercial goods on an importer's behalf. The importer of record holds the CARM account, posts the financial security, and carries legal responsibility for the accuracy of the filing.
The old arrangement, where the broker quietly absorbed a great deal of compliance risk on the client's behalf, is finished. What replaced it is a delegation relationship that somebody has to keep track of, client by client, and a set of obligations that now sit on people who have never carried them before.
What changed on the ground
- Release and accounting now depend on the importer's own CARM account and delegation, not the broker's number.
- RPP financial security is set against the highest monthly CBSA receivable over the previous twelve months, with a floor per program account. Post too little and the program is exposed in exactly the months volume peaks.
- The transition relief on late-payment penalties and interest ended 31 January 2026. Overdue balances now carry both.
None of that is news to anyone who does this for a living. The point is narrower: every one of those obligations has a date, an owner, and a consequence, and almost nobody has a system that holds all three.
The delay is never the work. It is the handoff.
A file moves between a client, a carrier, an agency, a warehouse, and two or three people inside your own office. Every one of those crossings is a place where a file can sit for a day because nobody was quite sure it was theirs.
The pattern is consistent across operations that look nothing alike. The people doing the work are fast. The queue in front of them is the slow part, and it is invisible, because it lives in an inbox rather than on a board. You cannot manage a bottleneck you cannot see, and no off-the-shelf product is going to model your specific set of crossings for you.
That is the thing a teardown is for. Thirty minutes on how a file actually travels through your shop usually locates the delay precisely, and often the answer is not software at all.
What you are probably running today.
01
The brokerage or forwarding platform
It files, rates, and tracks. It was built for the whole industry, so the places your operation is unusual are the places it has no opinion, and those gaps land on your staff.
02
The TMS or WMS
Strong at moving and storing goods. Much weaker at the obligation attached to the goods, which is the part that carries penalties.
03
The spreadsheet beside them
Where the delegation list, the exception log, the client-specific quirks, and the numbers anyone actually trusts have quietly ended up.
Note the direction of that list. The platform is usually fine. It is the third column that costs you, and the third column is the cheapest thing to build.
Six things that usually come out of the spreadsheet.
01
One record per shipment, end to end
Booking, documents, release, exceptions, and billing hanging off a single record instead of a thread. When somebody asks what happened to a file from March, the answer is a screen, not an afternoon.
02
Delegation of authority, tracked
Which importers have delegated to you in the CARM portal, which have not, and which are about to lapse. Right now that lives in somebody's head or a spreadsheet, and the cost of it being wrong is a shipment that does not move.
03
A document vault that survives a reassessment
CBSA can look back years. Invoices, permits, certificates of origin, and rulings filed against the transaction they belong to, with version history and an access trail, so producing them is retrieval rather than archaeology.
04
Exceptions as a queue, not an inbox
Holds, examinations, missing paperwork, and short-shipments routed to whoever owns them, with the clock visible. The work that actually costs money is the work that stalls, and email hides stalling well.
05
A client portal that ends the status call
Your clients phone because they cannot see anything. Give them the current state of their files and the list of what you are waiting on from them, and a real share of the day's interruptions stops happening.
06
Obligations on a calendar
Security amounts, bond renewals, licence dates, statement deadlines, client-specific requirements. Anything with a date and a consequence, surfaced before it matters rather than after.
This is the shape of work we already do.
Not logistics operators, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. These are document vaults, audit trails, and intake queues built for regulated organizations in other industries. The mechanics are the same ones this page is describing. Clients are never named.
Enterprise ops
Document Repository
A searchable internal vault with version history, access controls, and audit trail. Replaced a shared drive that had stopped scaling.
- → Average file lookup dropped from minutes to seconds
- → Audit-ready access trail on every document
- → Auto-expiry alerts on certificates, contracts, insurance docs
Regulated enterprise
Compliance & Audit System
Policy library, attestations, audit-ready logs, and evidence collection in one place. Built for teams who get audited.
- → Cut external audit prep from weeks to days
- → Eliminated email-based attestation chasing
- → Single source of truth for compliance evidence
Multi-site facilities
Internal Ticketing System
Request intake, triage, assignment, SLA tracking, and close-out. Built around how the team actually responds, not a generic helpdesk template.
- → Replaced a $$$ helpdesk SaaS with a tool that fits the team
- → SLAs visible in real time, not a quarterly report
- → Mobile intake reduced phone calls to the desk
You are not slow because your people are slow. You are slow because two of them are working from different lists.
What happens after the invoice.
Ownership
Source code, repositories, database, and hosting accounts go into your name on final payment. No licence, no renewal, nothing that switches off.
Support
No flat monthly retainer. Take the code and owe nothing, or keep an hourly relationship triaged by severity. Critical means now and costs more. Cosmetic gets the next available week.
Scope
Every quote is fixed before work starts, so the number you agree to is the number you pay. A single workflow costs a fraction of a whole system, and starting with one is usually the right call.
Switching over
Nobody on your staff should spend more than about fifteen minutes on the changeover. A new login and a password. Moving the data across is our job, not yours.
Tiers and figures are laid out on the pricing page, and the calculator will put your own subscription spend against a one-time build.
You vet your service providers. Vet us the same way.
- Commercial general liability
- $5,000,000
- Professional liability (E&O)
- $2,000,000
- Cyber liability
- $2,000,000
- WorkSafeBC account
- 201966367
Bound and in force.
Bound and in force.
Bound and in force.
Active. Clearance letter on request.
Certificates of insurance and a WorkSafeBC clearance letter are issued on request, usually the same day. A mutual NDA before the teardown is normal and welcome.
What operators ask first.
Are you trying to replace our brokerage platform?
Usually not, and we will say so early. Filing and rating engines are a solved, well-served category, and rebuilding one bespoke would cost more and be worse. The work worth doing is almost always the layer around it: the exception queue, the document vault, the delegation tracking, the client portal. That is where the spreadsheets are.
Do you file with CBSA on our behalf?
No. We are a software studio, not a broker, and nothing we build makes a declaration for you. What we build tracks the obligations, the documents, and the deadlines around the filings your licensed people are already making.
Who owns the software when it is finished?
You do. Source code, repositories, database, and hosting accounts go into your name on final payment. There is no licence to renew and nothing that switches off if you stop working with us.
What happens if we stop working with Bluestone?
You keep running. That is the point of owning it. The code is documented so any competent developer can pick it up, and the accounts are already yours. There is no monthly retainer holding the system hostage.
How does support work after launch?
Not as a flat monthly fee. Either you take the code and owe nothing further, or you keep an hourly relationship priced by how complex your system is. Work is triaged by severity: something critical is picked up immediately and costs more, something cosmetic goes in the next available week at the lower end.
Our data is commercially sensitive. How is that handled?
A mutual NDA before the teardown if you want one, and no client of ours is ever named publicly, including you. Bluestone carries $5M commercial general liability, $2M professional liability, and $2M cyber liability, and certificates are issued on request.
Do you work with operators outside Metro Vancouver?
Yes. The work is done remotely with on-site time where it matters, so a Kelowna or Prince George operation is handled the same as a Richmond one. Bluestone is registered in BC and carries a WorkSafeBC account for the site visits.
A free teardown of how a file moves through your shop.
Walk us through one real file from the moment it arrives to the moment it closes. You get a written breakdown of where the days go, what could be built, and what it would cost. If the honest answer is that your platform already covers it, we will tell you that and you will have lost half an hour.
Rather write it out? Send a message.