General

As an important payment voucher in international settlement, bills are widely used in international trade. Due to the wide variety and diverse nature of bills, coupled with the fact that most domestic trading companies rarely have access to foreign bills and lack the ability to identify them, there are also many risks in the use of international trade bills.

1. Bill risk

The risk of bills is caused by many reasons, such as the forgery and alteration of bills; Improper acquisition of bills is due to malicious intent or gross negligence; Invalid or defective bill behavior; And the lack of experience or ability of relevant personnel in their work. (Foreign trade enterprise ERP invoice signing management method and process)

In terms of risk prevention of bills, precautions should be taken:

A. Before international trade transactions are concluded, it is important to understand the customer's credit standing, be sure to have a clear understanding and take preventive measures. Especially for new customers with unclear credit and those with tight foreign exchange, backward regions, and unstable national situations.

B. The bills submitted by customers must be verified by the bank in advance to ensure safe collection.

C. Before a trade transaction, both parties must sign a stable, equal and mutually beneficial sales contract.

D. Before the bank has received the payment, it is not allowed to ship the goods too early to avoid empty payment.

E. Even receiving a check from the most reputable bank in the world as the paying bank does not necessarily mean receiving payment in the future. In recent years, cases of foreign unscrupulous merchants using forged bills and remittance vouchers to cheat in China have repeatedly occurred, and the number of cases is on the rise. We cannot take this lightly.

2. There are generally three types of bill fraud:

A. Forgery of foreign bank remittance vouchers. This situation is most common and has been found in many branches in China, with the aim of enticing domestic companies to ship goods, create favorable conditions such as prepayments, and defraud goods.

B. Forged large bank drafts, US Treasury checks. This situation is a loophole in the settlement method of "immediate settlement of foreign exchange" in the collection of clean bills. After receiving the payment, the funds are immediately transferred, and when the bank returns the bill for recovery, the illegal merchant has already fled, or has fraudulently obtained the goods or payment and transferred them out of the country, or has fraudulently obtained domestic company shipments or commissions through large bank drafts.

In addition to the above preventive measures, we also need to further strengthen the management of the settlement of the bank's accounting department, clarify its settlement discipline and responsibilities.

3. The Risk and Prevention of Bills of Exchange

In the process of using bills of exchange, in addition to the above, attention should also be paid to the principles that must be followed when issuing, accepting, and using bills of exchange:

A. The unit using the bill of exchange must be a legal person who opens an account with a bank;

B. The issuance of bills of exchange must be based on legitimate commodity transactions, and the issuance of bills of exchange without commodity transactions is prohibited;

C. After the bill of exchange is accepted, the acceptor or the payer is responsible for unconditionally paying the bill price;

D. Bills of exchange are not allowed to be negotiated or transferred except for being discounted to the bank. (Note: This regulation has been broken through by later bank settlement methods).

4. How to identify genuine and fake promissory notes

A. True promissory notes are printed on specialized paper with good paper quality and certain anti-counterfeiting measures, while fake promissory notes can only be printed on ordinary paper on the market, which is generally thinner and softer than the paper used for true promissory notes.

B. The ink formula for printing real promissory notes is confidential, and it is difficult for fraudsters to obtain it. Therefore, only similar colored ink can be used for printing, which results in a certain difference in the face color of fake promissory notes compared to real promissory notes.

C. The real promissory note numbers and fonts are standardized and neat, while some fake promissory note numbers and fonts are not arranged neatly and spaced evenly.

D. Due to illegal printing, the signature on the fake promissory note will inevitably be fake, which does not match the reserved signature held by the bank.

The above is a list of risks related to international trade bill management. Of course, with the help of foreign trade management software, trade bills can be managed uniformly, effectively avoiding international trade bill risks.