To automate TRACES portal lookups, stop treating the search as a task and treat the catalogue as data. A scheduled job takes your list of establishment codes, validates them against the official TRACES EU database, and reports only what changed. The repetitive part, three to five minutes of clicking per code, disappears. What remains is reviewing flags.
Definition
A scheduled validation job is an unattended run over your full code list on a fixed cadence, producing flags and a timestamped log.
What the job replaces
The manual loop is fixed and dull.
- Open the public establishment lists.
- Select the exporting country.
- Find the activity section.
- Search the approval number.
- Confirm the supplier details. ### The scale problem
At four minutes per code, a 2,000-code catalogue costs about 130 staff hours a month. That is most of a full-time role spent on searches that a job can do in seconds.
Building the schedule
Decide cadence, input and output, then leave it alone.
- Nightly for active suppliers, weekly for the long tail.
- Input from your supplier master list, not a copied spreadsheet.
- Output to a compliance dashboard plus an alert for new flags.
- Keep every run, so the history becomes an audit trail. The portal itself has no change alerts, so monitoring is the part automation adds rather than just speed. That gap is the practical argument for automating TRACES portal lookups.
What to alert on
- Newly delisted or suspended codes.
- Country or activity mismatches.
- Codes that failed to resolve at all. Silence on a good night is the point. Alerts should mean something.
FAQ
Why schedule rather than check on demand?
Because delistings happen between shipments, and nobody notices a change they never looked for.
How much manual effort does this remove?
Up to 80%, freeing the team for exception handling.
Is on-demand checking still useful?
Yes, a single-code spot check covers one-off questions.
See how many hours a scheduled job could hand back to your team. Watch a demo
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