IPAFFS stands for the Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed System, the UK government online portal that importers use to pre-notify the authorities before regulated goods arrive in Great Britain, run by the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) on behalf of DEFRA as part of the Border Target Operating Model (BTOM). Anyone importing products of animal origin, high-risk food or feed of non-animal origin, live animals, or certain plants and plant products must submit a pre-notification on IPAFFS. That pre-notification generates a Common Health Entry Document (CHED). Skip it, file it late, or get the detail wrong, and your goods can be held, rejected, or destroyed at the border, with you paying the storage and disposal costs.
Last updated: June 2026
Picture a refrigerated container of European cheese arriving at a port on a Friday afternoon. The buyer has customers waiting and a fixed shelf life ticking down. If the IPAFFS pre-notification was not submitted in time, or the certificate reference does not match, the consignment does not move. It sits in a holding facility accruing charges over the weekend while the clock on the use-by date runs. By the time the paperwork is sorted, the margin is gone and the stock may be unsellable. For a perishable importer, a compliance slip is not a fine to absorb later. It is a total loss now. That is why understanding IPAFFS properly is not optional admin: it is the difference between a profitable shipment and a written-off one.
This guide explains, in plain terms, what IPAFFS is, who has to use it, exactly how the process works, and what goes wrong when it fails. It is written for the importer, not the policy desk. Toward the end it looks honestly at where software and ERP systems genuinely reduce the workload, and where they do not, because no system removes the legal duty that sits with the importer of record.
IPAFFS stands for the Import of Products, Animals, Food and Feed System. It is the UK government digital service that importers use to notify the authorities, in advance, that a regulated consignment is on its way into Great Britain. The service is operated by the Animal and Plant Health Agency under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and it replaced the EU TRACES system for GB imports after Brexit.
The purpose of IPAFFS is straightforward: it gives the authorities advance sight of what is coming, from where, and in what condition, so they can decide whether a consignment needs a physical or documentary check before it is released. The system is the front door to GB import controls on biosecurity and food safety risk. Submitting a pre-notification in IPAFFS is how an importer formally declares a consignment and triggers the document, the CHED, that the goods need to travel through a border control post and into free circulation.
One point matters for clarity throughout this guide: IPAFFS is a service you submit information into. It is not a customs declaration system, and it is not the same as the certificates that accompany the goods. It sits alongside customs clearance and the official health paperwork, and the references between all three have to line up.
You need to use IPAFFS if you import regulated goods into Great Britain. The main categories are products of animal origin (POAO) such as meat, dairy, fish, eggs and honey; high-risk food and feed of non-animal origin (HRFNAO); live animals; germinal products; animal by-products; and many plants and plant products. If your consignment falls into one of these groups, a pre-notification on IPAFFS is required before it arrives.
In practice the legal responsibility to pre-notify sits with the importer, the person or business named as responsible for the consignment in Great Britain. You can carry out the submission yourself, or you can authorise a customs agent, freight forwarder or import broker to do it on your behalf. Many smaller importers delegate the keying to a broker. That is a perfectly normal arrangement, but it does not transfer the legal duty: if the pre-notification is wrong, it is the importer who carries the consequence at the border.
The category matters because it sets the rules. Products of animal origin and high-risk non-animal food and feed are subject to sanitary and phytosanitary controls and frequently need official certification. Plants and plant products sit under phytosanitary rules and often require a phytosanitary certificate. The risk category of a given product, and therefore the exact requirements and check frequency, is set by government and can change. The constant is that if your goods are on the controlled list, IPAFFS pre-notification is part of the cost of importing them.
IPAFFS works as a pre-notification workflow that you complete before your goods reach Great Britain. The high-risk and animal-origin process runs in this order:
The exact fields and timing depend on the commodity and the current BTOM rules. What does not change is the shape: register, gather data, pre-notify in good time, generate the CHED, reconcile the references, then clear the border. An importer running this for the first time should always confirm the current notice period and certification requirement on GOV.UK for the specific goods being shipped. A team that imports the same lines weekly will find the bottleneck is rarely the system itself: it is having the right data, accurate and ready, before the deadline. That is the part software can help with, covered further down.
A CHED is a Common Health Entry Document. It is the official document, generated by IPAFFS when you submit a pre-notification, that accompanies a regulated consignment through GB border controls and records the outcome of any checks. In short: the pre-notification is the action you take in IPAFFS, and the CHED is the document that action produces.
There are different CHED types depending on what you are importing. Products of animal origin, live animals, high-risk food and feed of non-animal origin, and plant products each map to a specific CHED variant, because the controls and the issuing authority differ between them. The CHED carries a unique reference number, and that reference is the thread that ties the whole import together. It links the pre-notification to the customs declaration and to the health or phytosanitary certificate, so that the customs system, the border authority and the importer are all describing the same goods.
For an importer the practical takeaways are simple. The CHED reference must be quoted accurately in the customs declaration, or the consignment will not reconcile and can be stopped. The CHED is also the record of whether a physical or documentary check was applied and what the result was, so it forms part of the audit trail that proves a consignment was imported lawfully. Keeping CHED references organised, and matched to the right purchase order, supplier and certificate, is one of the most error-prone manual tasks in food importing, which is exactly why it tends to be the first thing a well-built system takes off people's hands.
If you get an IPAFFS pre-notification wrong, the consignment can be held at the border, refused entry, or in the worst case destroyed, and the importer pays the costs that follow. A missing pre-notification, a late one, a mismatch between the CHED reference and the customs declaration, an incorrect commodity classification, or a certificate that does not match the goods can all trigger a hold. The border authority does not release goods it cannot reconcile.
The first cost is delay. A held consignment sits in a holding or inspection facility while the issue is resolved, and that storage is chargeable. For a container that is being held beyond its free period, demurrage and detention charges accrue daily and climb quickly. The second cost, and the one that hurts food importers most, is spoilage. Chilled and frozen goods have no patience for paperwork. A delay that a tin-can importer would shrug off can write off an entire reefer of fresh product, because the shelf life expires while the goods sit in limbo. The third cost is the worst case: goods that cannot be brought into compliance may be re-exported or destroyed, and the importer bears the loss of the stock plus the disposal bill.
There is also a slower, compounding cost. Repeated errors mark an importer as higher risk, which can mean more frequent checks on future consignments, more delay, and more cost, in a loop. The lesson every experienced importer learns is that the cheapest pre-notification is the correct one, filed on time. Accuracy at the keyboard, days before the goods arrive, is what protects the margin at the port.
IPAFFS is the pre-notification engine of the Border Target Operating Model. The BTOM is the UK government framework that sets out how GB border controls work for goods that carry biosecurity and food safety risk, including the regime of certification, pre-notification and physical checks for imports of animal products, plants, and high-risk food and feed. IPAFFS is the system importers use to meet the pre-notification part of that framework.
The BTOM organises controlled goods by risk category, and the category determines the requirements: which certificates are needed, how much advance notice the pre-notification requires, and how likely a consignment is to be selected for a documentary, identity or physical inspection at a border control post. IPAFFS is where the importer declares the consignment so the model can apply the right rule to it. The Export Health Certificate or phytosanitary certificate provides the official assurance from the exporting country; IPAFFS provides the advance notice to the GB authority; the CHED is the document that ties them together and travels with the goods.
For the importer, the value of understanding the BTOM is that it explains why the steps exist. The certificate, the pre-notification and the border check are not three separate bits of bureaucracy. They are one risk-based system, and IPAFFS is the part the importer interacts with most. Because the BTOM is a living framework, with risk categories and timings that the government reviews and adjusts, the practical discipline is to check the current rules for your specific goods rather than relying on how it worked last year.
Software and ERP systems reduce the IPAFFS burden by removing the manual, error-prone work around the pre-notification: pulling consignment data from purchase orders, tracking deadlines, linking the CHED and certificate references, and keeping an audit trail. They do not replace the IPAFFS portal and do not transfer the legal obligation, which always stays with the importer. Good software is built around the government portals, not instead of them. It makes the workflow faster and far less likely to slip, while a human still reviews and submits.
Here is where a system built for a food importer genuinely helps, and all of it is vendor-neutral, the same whether you run Odoo, a bespoke build, or another platform:
What software cannot do is equally important to state plainly. It cannot submit a legally valid pre-notification without a human, it cannot guarantee a classification is correct, and it cannot remove the importer's responsibility under the BTOM. Anyone selling automation that claims to do those things is overselling. The realistic and very real win is this: the manual workload, the re-keying, the missed deadlines and the lost references shrink dramatically, and the people doing the work spend their time checking and deciding rather than copying and chasing. For food and drink importers in particular, where margins are thin and shelf life is unforgiving, that reduction in friction is worth real money. A well-implemented system pairs naturally with broader inventory and warehouse management, and modern AI-assisted ERP implementation can go further still by reading supplier documents and pre-filling fields for a human to approve. The principle holds at every level: support the obligation, never pretend to replace it. For the full picture of the operational software a food importer actually needs, see our guide to food importer software in the UK.
Yes. IPAFFS pre-notification is a legal requirement for importing regulated goods into Great Britain, including products of animal origin, high-risk food and feed of non-animal origin, live animals, and many plants and plant products. The duty sits with the importer. You can authorise a broker to submit on your behalf, but the legal responsibility for an accurate, on-time notification remains yours.
The IPAFFS system itself is free to access and use; there is no charge to submit a pre-notification through the government portal. The real costs of import compliance sit elsewhere: staff time to gather data and key the notification, customs agent or broker fees if you delegate it, any official certificate costs, and separate charges that may apply for inspections at a border control post. Budget for the labour and the broker, not for the system.
IPAFFS is the system; the CHED is the document it produces. You submit a pre-notification in IPAFFS, and on submission the system generates a Common Health Entry Document with a unique reference. The CHED is what accompanies the consignment through border controls and records any checks. Put simply, IPAFFS is the action and the portal, and the CHED is the output you carry.
If you are importing regulated goods from the EU into Great Britain, then yes, the same pre-notification rules apply, because IPAFFS governs imports into GB regardless of whether the goods come from the EU or further afield. The relevant question is not where the goods come from but whether they are on the controlled list of animal products, high-risk food and feed, or plants. If they are, IPAFFS pre-notification is required. Always confirm the current requirement for your specific commodity and route.
IPAFFS requires a minimum notice period before the goods arrive, and that period is set by government and varies by commodity type and category. There is no single universal figure, so the safe practice is to check the current required notice for your specific goods on GOV.UK and build that lead time into your process. Filing late is treated like not filing at all and can get the consignment held, so the working rule is to pre-notify as early as your data allows.
Parts of the workflow around IPAFFS can be automated, but the legal submission still needs a human. Software can assemble the consignment data from purchase orders, track the pre-notification deadline, link the CHED and certificate references, and keep the audit trail, which removes most of the manual effort and the risk of mistakes. What it cannot and should not do is submit a legally binding notification unsupervised or take on the importer's responsibility. The right model is software that prepares and a person who reviews and submits.
IPAFFS is the UK government portal importers use to pre-notify the authorities before regulated goods reach Great Britain, and it is the part of the Border Target Operating Model importers touch most. Two facts should stay with you. First, the pre-notification generates the CHED, and that reference must reconcile with your customs and certificate paperwork or the consignment can be held, rejected, or destroyed at your cost. Second, the system is free to use, but the real expense is staff time and the price of getting it wrong, both of which good software meaningfully reduces. Get the data right, file on time, and the border becomes a checkpoint rather than a wall.
If import compliance, batch traceability and true landed cost are eating your team's time, the answer is rarely more spreadsheets. It is a system built around the government portals that pulls the data together, links the documents, and reminds you of the deadlines, so your people review and decide instead of re-key and chase. See how an ERP for UK food distribution can take the friction out of importing, and talk to us about a build shaped around how your business actually works.
This guide was written by Softomate Solutions, a UK ERP, CRM and automation software agency, and reviewed for accuracy against current GOV.UK guidance. AI tools assisted with drafting; the content was checked and edited by a human. It is general information, not legal or customs advice; always confirm the current rules for your specific goods on GOV.UK or with a qualified customs adviser.
IPAFFS is one piece of the food-import operation; see how it connects to stock, traceability and accounts in software for UK food importers and wholesalers.
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