Every customs declaration made to HMRC now runs through one system: the Customs Declaration Service. CHIEF, the old platform, closed to imports in April 2023, and CDS is simply the plumbing of UK trade. Yet businesses still trip over the front door - the subscription step that links a Government Gateway account to the customs estate. For hauliers setting up to declare for customers, or traders doing their own entries for the first time, it is the first hour of work, and it is easier than the mythology suggests.
Subscribing a Government Gateway user ID to CDS opens the customs toolkit: paying Customs Duty and import VAT, downloading postponed import VAT statements or import VAT certificates for the VAT Return, and submitting import and export declarations through software. One subscription covers both directions - there is no separate sign-up for exports if you have already subscribed for imports.
Behind that headline sits the wider service menu: managing the CDS contact email address, uploading documents and receiving messages about declarations, setting up a Direct Debit for a duty deferment account, using a cash account for declarations, and running purchased customs software for import and export entries. In practice, subscription is what turns an EORI number from a registration into a working capability.
The process needs the business’s own Government Gateway user ID and password - an agent’s Government Gateway ID cannot be used, which catches out businesses that assumed their agent’s credentials covered them. If there is no user ID, one can be created as part of the journey.
HMRC asks for the date the business started, the National Insurance number for an individual or sole trader, the business address held on customs records, the Unique Taxpayer Reference, and an EORI number starting with GB or XI. A business without an EORI can apply for one during the subscription - XI numbers have their own eligibility criteria. The EORI and the CDS accounts then link to the Government Gateway ID, and one user ID can only ever hold one EORI.
Access arrives either within two hours or within five working days if HMRC needs to run more checks. The two-hour outcome is common enough that a business can subscribe in the morning and be downloading statements after lunch.
Two housekeeping items are worth doing immediately. The first is adding team members: staff who need to use the subscription can be added through the business tax account, with per-person control over what each can access - far better than passing one password around the traffic office. The second is connecting the money plumbing: the deferment account Direct Debit, the cash account, and the postponed VAT statement downloads all live behind the same sign-in, and setting them up before the first busy shipping week beats discovering them during it.
Older guidance and older agents still speak CHIEF fluently, which causes confusion. Since 6 April 2023 there has been no option to continue using CHIEF for imports: anyone importing must be on CDS. Export declarations have followed the same migration. A business whose paperwork or agent references the old system should treat that as a prompt to confirm which platform its declarations actually run on - the answer now should be CDS everywhere.
Most hauliers never submit a declaration, but CDS touches them anyway. The customer’s deferment account, the agent’s access, the document upload that carries the CMR or the invoice - all of it sits in CDS. When a movement stalls “at customs”, the reason is often inside this estate: an unsubscribed trader, a missing team-member permission, an undownloaded statement blocking a VAT position. Knowing the shape of the front door makes those phone calls much shorter.
Three snags account for most failed first attempts. Using an agent’s Government Gateway user ID - the service will not accept it, because the subscription must sit with the business itself. A mismatch on the business address: HMRC checks the address given against the one held on its customs records, and a trading address offered instead of the registered one bounces. And the EORI assumption: one Government Gateway user ID can hold exactly one EORI number, so a business that set up a second Gateway account years ago can find its EORI attached to credentials nobody remembers.
Once subscribed, the estate is broader than declarations alone. The cash account lets duty be paid straight from a topped-up balance at declaration time. The document upload service carries the invoices and certificates that support entries. The postponed import VAT statement - the monthly evidence for VAT accounting on imports - lives here too, and it is not posted or emailed: it has to be downloaded, every month, from inside the service.