ICES Advisories 41 and 42/2026

On 7 October 2026 the Directorate General of Systems and Data Management (DGoS, which runs ICES) published two SCMTR advisories about cargo that is moved on under transhipment, between a gateway port and an inland customs location. Both are for the people who move and shed that cargo — custodians and CFSs, transhippers and terminal operators — not for a forwarder filing a CSN. They are worth knowing because they name the messages a counterparty may ask you about, and the order those messages must go in. ICEGATE's SCMTR advisories page dates both 8 October 2026; the documents themselves say 7 October.

Name them in full. ICES Advisory 41/2026 and 42/2026 are advisories from ICES, the customs system — not a CBIC circular or a port's public notice that happens to carry the same number (JNCH Public Notice 42/2026, for one, is a different document).

Advisory 41/2026 — filing the export transhipment messages, in order

Customs' background: Regulation 7 of the SCMT Regulations asks for Form-VIII for goods moving between a gateway port and an inland customs location. For an export moving from an inland location to the gateway port, customs' systems group has enabled a set of CIM messages — SF, ASR, DP, DT, AR and AT — so the movement is reported electronically. The advisory sets out who files what and in which order.

The order is the rule. Customs writes that each message is filed only after the one before it has been acknowledged, and that nothing further goes until SF has a positive acknowledgement and the officer's approval:

After the let export order and the stuffing, the custodian files SF, container by container. The officer approves the stuffing container by container.The custodian passes the SF data to the transhipper if it is not the transhipper itself; the transhipper files ASR, which customs checks against the SF data.After a positive ASR acknowledgement the transhipper files DP. The acknowledgement carries the CIM number and date, which the transhipper shares with the custodian.The custodian files DT with the actual departure time, against that CIM.The transhipper files AR when the container has entered the terminal gate at the next unloading station; the terminal operator (or custodian) files AT with the actual arrival time.

If a container is stripped (ST), customs says the SF is filed again afterwards, "followed by DP, DR, AR and AT" — its words. DR is defined nowhere in the advisory; it may well mean DT, the departure message, but that is our reading, not customs'.

What customs asks you to get right in SF

SF is the key to everything after it. It must be given exactly as the shipping bill has it.A shipping bill with several containers needs an SF per container, with the packages allocated to each — customs' example is ten packages in two containers, packages 1 to 5 in the first and 6 to 10 in the second — and every container's SF approved by the officer before the ASR goes.Cross-check container numbers, package numbers and package details against the shipping bill before submitting; carry the CIM number and date into every later filing.

Before any of it

Customs lists three pre-conditions: the officers must have mapped every custodian code to its warehouse code (checked with the CUSADM role), one custodian code to one warehouse code, and the messages are filed only through the API utility on ICEGATE, with a generated API key. The custodian-and-transhipper filing utility and the Message Implementation Guide for the CIM messages are on ICEGATE.

Advisory 42/2026 — the CFS's LCL import transhipment message (ITP)

This is a question-and-answer guide for a CFS at a gateway port moving LCL cargo on to a destination ICD under transhipment. Customs says the message is CFCHI51, filed by the custodian as JSON through the API on ICEGATE, and that for FCL cargo the SMTP number is already generated by the system, so no such message is needed. Every message gets an acknowledgement after the officer acts on it.

One filing has three parts, tied together by the same ITP job number and job date:

Customs says every field is mandatory, and gives the limits it expects: job number 7 digits; dates DDMMYYYY; CFS code 10 characters; ICEGATE ID 25; mode of transport 1; vehicle or train number 20; new container and seal numbers 15 each; destination ICD code 6; bond number 20; agency code 15; IGM rotation, line and subline numbers 7, 4 and 4 digits; SMTP number 7 digits; old container number 15; IRN 16 and document code 6 characters.

If the acknowledgement is negative, customs' answer is to read the error, correct the particulars and file again; it points to the error list on ICEGATE (the advisory refers to it as an annexure, but the copy on ICEGATE carries only a flowchart). It also tells the CFS to keep the old-container details consistent with the newly filed IGM and SMTP records.

What this changes for you

If you are a forwarder or consolidator filing a CSN: nothing in your filing. Neither advisory touches SACHM22. If a CFS or transhipper asks you for "the SF", "the ASR" or "the ITP", it is asking for its own message — see Who else files, and how it touches you. What you can give them is the CSN number and the MCIN or PCIN — and that is what they need: Advisory 41/2026 has the custodian file the SF per container, "giving the PCINs/MCINs stuffed into or stripped out of that container", so a wrong or missing CIN on your side shows up in their message.If you are a CFS, custodian or transhipper, these are customs' own words on the order and the contents. SCMTR.io does not file these messages; it reads the files, shows what each field means and explains their error codes — see Reading an inland message.A note on "ITP". Four pages here — Who else files, Which message do I file, the glossary and Cargo type, movement and consolidation — describe the CFS's import transhipment message as going through a value-added network, from the 2026 technical document. Advisory 42/2026 now describes it as JSON through the ICEGATE API, while still mentioning a "VAN service provider" in one step; which channel a given CFS uses today is not something the advisory settles, and those pages now say so.

Nothing here is a claim about how customs checks these messages beyond what the advisories say. No acknowledgement for any of them has been seen here, so which checks are enforced is not known.