The shape of the record
If you are building or integrating anything that touches EU border compliance, it helps to think of the Common Health Entry Document as a single record with two write phases and two distinct owners. It lives in TRACES NT and it is submitted before the consignment reaches a border control post.
Phase one: the operator writes
Part 1 is populated by the operator responsible for the consignment, in practice the importer or their customs agent. The payload covers:
- consignment and goods detail
- country of origin
- health certificate references
- establishment approval numbers for every facility that produced, processed or stored the goods Anyone mapping fields from an internal system should treat the establishment code list as a repeating group rather than a single value, because a real consignment often carries several. The CHED Part 1 and Part 2 structure sets out how these sections divide.
Phase two: the authority writes
Part 2 is written by the border control post. It records documentary check results, identity check results, physical check results where applied, and the final decision.
The immutability boundary
This is the part that matters most for system design. A CHED can be amended while it remains on the operator's side. Once the border control post records its decision in Part 2, the document is final. Treat the Part 2 write as the point where your local copy becomes read-only, and design your correction workflow to sit entirely upstream of it.
Validation belongs upstream
Because documentary checks happen before physical inspection, any validation you can run pre-submission returns far more value than post-submission error handling. To see that validation layer working against live TRACES data, watch a demo.
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