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Known limitations

This page is here so that nothing on your screen surprises you. It lists what the ITS portal does not do today, and the places where a word, a number or a control means something other than it appears to.

None of this means the record is wrong: the declarations, their stamps and their versions are sound. Where something matters while you are working, the chapter it belongs to repeats the warning in place. Limitations of the Reports, Governance, Customs offices and Administration screens are listed in their own chapters.

What the portal does not do​

  • Nobody lodges, stamps, amends or cancels a declaration in the portal. ITS is system-to-system for now: those acts come from each administration's customs system.
  • The declaration form can still be opened by typing its address, as Register a declaration, although nothing links to it. It is not how declarations are lodged, and its wording is written for a State Party even when a REC opens it. Do not use it.
  • The Attachments tab offers an Attach documents box to everyone. A State Party's or a REC's attempt is refused; the Secretariat's operator account would really attach. Do not use it. See Attachments.
  • There is no profile or password page. Change your password with Forgot Password? on the sign-in form.
  • Help gives no contact. It reads For integration help, contact your ITS technical administrator, and names nobody.
  • The corridor map shows no tracked consignments, because no electronic seal platform reports positions yet.

Finding your way​

  • You start on System integration. Administrators land there the first time they sign in, although this manual does not cover it. Use the header tabs.
  • A mistyped address can trap you. The portal returns you to the last page you were on after every sign-in, including a Page not found that has no header or links. Type the address of a real page to escape.
  • Every address typed into the browser does a round trip through sign-in first, so it takes a moment longer than a click inside the portal.
  • Some pages are reached only from All areas: Notifications, Failed transmissions, Customs offices and Governance.
  • All areas describes Reports as six subject areas; there are five plus All reports.
  • A page you may not use can look broken rather than forbidden. Governance, opened by address, shows Request failed — Forbidden from access; the roles page keeps loading for ever.
  • The account menu shows a dash for Role for everyone, and a dash for Organisation for a State Party or a REC.

Languages​

  • Translations are incomplete and partly machine-made. In French and Arabic the main tabs stay in English, and Needing attention stays in English in Arabic. Several words are translated wrongly.
  • The landing page footer shows a placeholder instead of the year in French, Arabic and Portuguese, and garbled characters in Spanish and Kiswahili.
  • The language button can be unreachable. The city clocks overlap it in the console, the header's notch covers it in Arabic, and for a State Party or a REC it is hidden on a screen about 1440 pixels wide. Choose the language on the public landing page: the choice is shared.
  • The sign-in form has its own language menu, which shows codes such as en-US and lists languages twice.

Times and time zones​

  • The public Track page labels its times UTC, but they are your local time. In Kampala, a stamp ITS received at 22:27 UTC shows as 01:27 the next day under the heading UTC.
  • The declaration pages show times in your browser's time zone without saying so.
  • The account menu's Signed in time is in UTC, and so is the date in a serial number and the Verify page's Issued on, which can be a day earlier than the console's date.
  • Reports show times in UTC without saying so, so a declaration's registration time in a report can differ by hours from its detail page.

Public pages​

  • The Verify page says Scanned transit document even when you typed the code.
  • A discharged consignment can read not yet moved on the Track page's declaration card.
  • The Track page's corridor can show the destination twice, the second time as Between administrations.
  • The landing page's Connected administrations and Active corridors always show a dash.
  • The landing page counts 55 member states: the members of the African Union, not the State Parties to the AfCFTA.

Overview and figures​

  • This month is compared with the whole previous month, so early in a month every comparison points down.
  • A change of 0.0 points shows a down arrow.
  • Sept 26 means September 2026, and September is written Sept in some places and Sep in others.
  • Discharged on the Overview can differ from Discharged in the funnel, and Departed differs between the Overview and the Reports, because each counts in its own way.
  • Overdue now opens the whole register, not the overdue declarations; the register has no overdue filter.
  • A REC's analytics can include countries outside its scope. The reporting service's list of a REC's members can differ from the one ITS uses for the register, so a REC can see figures, countries and corridors for declarations it cannot open.
  • Some headings are in Title Case, such as Failed Transmissions and Top 5 Countries of Departure.

Failed transmissions and notifications​

  • The portal's own background requests are recorded as your organisation's failed transmissions. Every page load can add refusals such as GET /api/v1/authz/tenants or GET /api/v1/notifications/…. They also count in the Integration report's Rejections and raise N of your requests were refused today notices. A REC's refusals can be charged to one of its member states.
  • Failed transmissions show only relative times, such as 11 days ago.
  • Notices can show placeholders such as %d and %s instead of numbers and names.
  • A one-refusal notice reads 1 of your requests were refused today, and today is the day it was sent.
  • The same event can be notified more than once.
  • The Secretariat receives Expect it at your frontier notices, and a State Party is told about its own declaration as if another country had lodged it.
  • The number on the bell does not match the unread count in the notification centre.

Declarations​

  • A discharged declaration can still read Held by: Between administrations — Awaiting a UG entry stamp, and its corridor can show the destination twice. The discharge is the real last act.
  • The state goes back to Departed when the destination releases the goods inland.
  • The Lifecycle tile's times can be out of order, because each state shows the last time it was reached.
  • Version 15 · issued … shows version 1's time, and Issued by names the country of the latest act, not the country that lodged it.
  • Time in transit keeps counting after discharge, and an overdue declaration is not flagged on its own page.
  • Numbers have no thousands separators: 3200000, 24000 / 24000 kg.
  • The History tab is headed Newest first but starts with version 1, and Who has been told lists the announcements of every version under the latest one.
  • A declaration outside your scope takes about ten seconds to say Not available.
  • There is no difference on screen between an officer's discharge and a closure by ITS for a destination with no system on ITS.
  • Held by can show a country code, such as TN, instead of the country's name.
  • The Stamps and Version columns are usually the same number, because every stamp adds a version.