If you manage a declarants team, you will recognise this scene. It is 16:30, the queue looks under control, and someone says, “I will just knock out these last few one liners manually, quicker than logging in Customaite.” Five minutes later they are done, everyone feels productive, and the day ends on a good note.
The problem is what that habit does to your performance view.
The work gets done, customers are served, and the queue is cleared. Yet when you look at your performance figures, something does not add up. The numbers look tidy, but your team feels stretched. Certain customers seem simple on paper, but everyone knows they are not. Productivity rises one week and dips the next, and it is hard to say why.
The work you cannot see is the work that skews the numbers
Across the industry, one part of the job is often handled outside the main system. The one liners. Quick declarations, short follow-ups, small fixes, last-minute changes. They look harmless because each one takes only a moment.
Declarants often deal with these manually. The logic is understandable. If a request feels like a two-minute job, it seems faster to do it directly in email, a carrier portal, or by copying details from a previous file. In the moment, it feels efficient.
When one liners are done directly in the declaration software and not through Customaite, they do not show up in the Customaite dashboard. The filing is done, but your performance view is incomplete.
A simple example:
Declarant B has done more total volume, no question. Yet your system only sees 35. So, your figures suggest Declarant A is ahead, even though the opposite is true. That is not a small detail. It changes how you coach people, how you distribute work, and how you explain performance to stakeholders.
The same distortion happens on the customer's side. A customer who sends ten “quick” changes a day may look low effort in reports if those tasks are not captured. They may be one of your biggest time drains.
One liners are not small once you add them up
A one liner here and there feels harmless. But any manager who has stood behind a desk on a busy day knows they pile up fast.
Think about a customer who sends constant “quick questions” or last-minute changes. Each request might take two minutes. Ten of those in a day is twenty minutes. Spread across a week; that is a chunk of a person’s capacity. If none of it is recorded, that customer looks easy in your reports when they are draining time.
Or take Friday afternoons. The big files are mostly cleared, but a stream of tiny fixes keeps popping up. People stay late, not because the big work is hard, but because the small work never stops. If that small work is invisible, your staffing plan for next month will be wrong.
What changes when everything is captured
When your team puts every declaration into Customaite, including the one liners, the dashboard finally shows what is really happening.
Answers you have wanted for ages:
And because it is live, you can act while it still matters.
Relatable day to day wins
Managers often tell us that the shift is practical, not theoretical.
You notice that one customer generates an enormous number of one liners, so you renegotiate how requests are sent or batch them into planned slots.
You see that one declarant seems slower on paper, but the dashboard shows they handle the most complex cases and a high share of short jobs. Suddenly your coaching and recognition became fair.
You spot a pattern in one liners around a certain commodity. That is a process issue, not a people issue. You fix the root cause, and the noise drops.
Efficiency at real customs pace
With everything captured in one place, teams do not just get clearer metrics. They become faster. Managers and declarants report that when the full flow runs through Customaite, it becomes realistic to handle around 50 to 70 declarations per declarant per day, without losing control or burning people out.
That improvement is hard to sustain if half the work lives outside the tool. You cannot streamline what you cannot see.
The simple takeaway
If a declaration is not in Customaite, it does not exist in your performance view. One liners done manually may feel quicker, but they quietly distort workload, customer effort, and team efficiency.
When your team does every declaration in the tool, big and small, your metrics become trustworthy. Your coaching becomes sharper. Your planning becomes realistic. And the whole operation runs with fewer blind spots.
That is what real performance management looks like.
To wrap up, capturing one-liners is not only about getting a fair performance view. It also protects your operation. Stay tuned for next week’s blogpost, where we will dive deeper into how copy-pasting one-liners outside a controlled system increases compliance risk and can lead to costly mistakes and fines.
If you would like to talk this through with one of our experts, click here.