What does a Landed Cost & Compliance FTE own?
A Landed Cost & Compliance FTE on ftes.ai owns landed cost accuracy and customs compliance exceptions, in the Operations department of the e-commerce org chart. It is accountable for landed cost being accurate per unit, customs entries consolidated where they can be, and exceptions caught. It exists because most stores track product cost and treat freight, duty and brokerage as overhead, which is how a fifty-dollar product can carry an eighty-dollar landed cost on a cross-border parcel without anyone noticing.
It does not own the filing, the broker relationship or the tariff position. It owns the allocation, the checks and the proposals.
How is landed cost allocated?
For each inbound shipment the Landed Cost & Compliance FTE reads the supplier invoice, the freight and insurance invoices, the duty and the brokerage charge from the broker's statement, and allocates them across the units on the shipment by the method the owner chose, by value, by weight, by volume or a mix, stated on every allocation. The result is a landed cost per unit, dated to the shipment, which the Controller FTE loads into the margin and the Cash Officer FTE uses to value stock.
Where an invoice has not arrived, the allocation is provisioned from the shipment's expected costs and marked as provisioned until the invoice replaces it, so coverage is always visible.
Why does the cost per entry matter so much?
Customs brokerage is charged per entry, a fixed fee each time a shipment is declared, regardless of what is in it. A store that ships cross-border orders parcel by parcel, each as its own entry, pays that fee on every parcel, which can put the whole brokerage cost onto a single unit. Consolidating the day's parcels into one entry spreads the same fee across all of them. A labelled worked example, illustrative only: a fifty-dollar fee per entry on a single-unit parcel adds fifty dollars to that unit's landed cost; the same fee on a consolidated entry of three hundred units adds under seventeen cents each.
The Landed Cost & Compliance FTE finds where per-parcel filing is happening, models the consolidated alternative with the broker's daily entry fee, and proposes the filing change with the per-unit effect shown, for the owner and the broker to act on.
How are classification and origin checked?
Each product line carries a classification code and a country of origin that determine its duty. The Landed Cost & Compliance FTE checks every shipment line against the store's own product records: a line whose classification differs from the product's recorded one, an origin that does not match the supplier's, a product with no classification at all, is raised as an exception with the line and the rule it failed, before the shipment is declared. Exceptions go to the owner's named reviewer and the broker; the FTE does not resolve them.
The check is against the store's own data. It is not tariff advice, and the FTE says so on every exception.
What does the Landed Cost & Compliance FTE never do?
It never files a customs entry, never acts as the store's broker, and never gives legal or tariff advice; it allocates, checks against the store's records and proposes, and the broker and the owner act. It never backdates a landed cost; costs apply from the shipment's date forward, like the Controller FTE's. It never presents a provisioned allocation as actual.
It also never changes a product's classification in the store's records on its own; a mismatch is an exception for a person.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Landed Cost & Compliance FTE reports landed-cost coverage, the share of units with actual rather than provisioned costs, landed cost per unit by product and shipment, entries filed and the per-unit brokerage cost each carried, consolidation proposals and their measured effect after the owner and broker acted, and compliance exceptions raised and resolved. Coverage and provisioning are shown so the Controller FTE's margin inherits an honest confidence band.
A landed-cost jump is reported with its cause, a duty change, a fee per entry, a currency move or a freight surcharge, never as a bare number.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Landed Cost & Compliance FTE feeds the Controller, Cash Officer, Buyer and Inventory FTEs, and reads the Warehouse Officer FTE's receipts to match shipments to units. It reads supplier invoices, freight forwarder invoices and the customs broker's statements, and the store's product records in Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, NetSuite or QuickBooks. Onboarding is custom because cost and origin data, and the broker's fee schedule, must be agreed before any allocation is trustworthy.