How to file an EUDR Due Diligence Statement in TRACES NT, step by step.

Last updated: 23 August 2026

Before you file: what the statement has to say

A Due Diligence Statement is not a form you fill in to ask permission. It is a declaration you sign to say the work is already done: that you have collected the information, assessed the risk, found it negligible, and are willing to stand behind that. Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1115 is blunt about the order: an operator must exercise due diligence and submit the statement before placing the product on the market. TRACES is only where you record a decision you have already made.

So the filing goes quickly only if this is ready first. Article 9 sets out what the statement must carry:

• your identity as the operator: name, address, and, for an importer, your EORI number;
• the commodity: the HS code (coffee is 0901, cocoa 1801), a plain description, and the quantity: net mass in kilograms, and where relevant a volume or supplementary unit;
• the country of production;
• the geolocation of every plot where the coffee or cocoa was produced, with the date or time range of production;
• a statement that due diligence was carried out and that the risk of non-compliance is no more than negligible.

TRACES does not judge whether your plots are deforestation-free. It records your statement that you checked. The assessment behind the click is the real compliance; the filing is the paperwork that follows it.

If you are not yet sure the plot geolocation is in order, that is the thing to settle before you go near TRACES. See the geolocation requirements guide for the point-vs-polygon rule and the precision trap. The rest of this page assumes the substance is ready and you are down to recording it.

Step 1: Get an EU Login account

TRACES sits behind EU Login, the European Commission’s single sign-on. Before you can touch the deforestation system you need an EU Login account tied to a real work email address. Creating one takes a few minutes: you register the email, confirm it from the verification link, and set a password. This account is your identity across every Commission service, not just TRACES, so use an address you will keep.

A quiet gotcha: the EUDR system has a separate practice environment (“Acceptance”) and a live one (“Production”), and access to one is not access to the other. When you come to file for real, make sure you are in Production. The two look almost identical.

Step 2: Request access to TRACES as an operator

An EU Login gets you to the door; it does not decide what you may do inside. On first entry to TRACES you request an operator role and attach yourself to an organisation: either by finding your company if it is already known to the system, or by creating it. EUDR distinguishes sharply between an operator (who places goods on the market and files the statement) and a trader (who only receives and passes on reference numbers), and you are asking for the operator capability. If you are not certain which you are, our three-question self-check settles it before you request the wrong thing.

A request usually has to be validated before it is live (either by an administrator in your own organisation or by the relevant authority), so this is the step to start early. It is not instantaneous, and it is the one most likely to leave a first-time filer waiting when a deadline is close.

Step 3: Your operator profile, and the EORI import needs

With operator access granted, your organisation carries a profile: legal name, registered address, country, and identifiers. For an importer (anyone bringing coffee or cocoa in from outside the EU), one identifier is not optional. Because the goods cross a customs border, the operator profile needs a valid EORI number (Economic Operators Registration and Identification), and a statement that declares an import activity without one will be rejected at submission.

The EORI trap is real and easy to hit: the statement fails at the last step, not the first, so you can enter an entire consignment before the system tells you the operator record was incomplete. Confirm the EORI is on the profile before you build a statement, not after.

If you already import anything into the EU you almost certainly have an EORI; if you do not, it is issued by your national customs authority, and getting it is its own short errand worth doing well ahead of time.

Step 4: Create the statement (activity and commodity)

Now the statement itself. You create a new Due Diligence Statement and describe the consignment it covers. In order, that means:

• The activity. For a coffee or cocoa importer this is Import: you are placing the product on the EU market for the first time. (Domestic and export activities exist too; they are not your case.)
• The commodity and product. You give the HS code (the customs classification) and a short description. Green coffee sits under heading 0901; cocoa beans under 1801. The code you choose has to match what you actually declare at customs.
• The quantity. The net mass in kilograms is required; depending on the product you may also give a volume or a supplementary unit. This is the weight of the commodity itself, not the shipment’s gross weight.
• The country of production: where the coffee or cocoa was grown, which is not necessarily where you bought it or where it shipped from.

None of these fields is conceptually hard. What catches people is consistency: the HS code, the country, and the quantity on the statement have to line up with the customs declaration and the commercial documents for the same goods, because a mismatch is exactly what an inspecting authority looks for.

Step 5: Add the plot geolocation

This is the part that makes an EUDR statement different from ordinary customs paperwork, and the part where a filing most often stalls. The statement must carry the geolocation of every plot the consignment’s coffee or cocoa came from. In TRACES you provide this as a GeoJSON file (a plain-text geographic format), which you upload against the statement.

Each plot is either a point (allowed for a plot of four hectares or less) or a polygon boundary (required above four hectares), with coordinates to at least six decimal places. A file that is malformed (a polygon ring that does not close, coordinates in the wrong order, an Area value quoted as a string so it reads as zero) is rejected here, and the error messages are terse. The mechanics of a valid file, and the traps that quietly invalidate a good one, are their own subject; the geolocation requirements guide walks through them in full.

Assembling clean GeoJSON from what producers actually send (spreadsheets, phone-app pins, photographs of hand-drawn maps) is usually the single largest piece of the whole job. The upload is a moment; the data behind it is the work.

Step 6: Submit, and the two numbers you get back

When the consignment, the country, the quantity and the geolocation are in, you submit. At that point the statement carries your declaration that due diligence is done and the risk is negligible, which is why the moment matters more than it looks. Behind the scenes the system first records the statement under an internal identifier and a status of submitted; once it is accepted, two things are returned to you:

• a reference number, which identifies this particular statement; and
• a separate verification number, which lets anyone you give it to confirm, in TRACES, that the reference number is genuine and belongs to a real statement.

The reference number names the statement; the verification number proves it is authentic. They travel as a pair: a downstream customer or an authority needs both to look your statement up, and neither alone is enough.

Keep both, against that consignment, somewhere durable. They are not decorative: they are how the rest of the supply chain, and an inspector, will find and check the work you just filed.

After filing: the handoff and the five-year record

Filing is not quite the end. Two duties outlast the click. First, the handoff: your immediate customers (the next operators or traders down the chain) are entitled to your reference and verification numbers, and must be able to pass their own due diligence by relying on them. Getting those numbers to the right party, cleanly, is part of the job.

Second, the record. You must keep your due-diligence documentation and your statements for five years from the date the product went on the market. The DDS reference number is a pointer; the defensible thing is the evidence file behind it (the plot data, the screening result, the reasoning) that you can produce if an authority ever asks how you reached “negligible risk.” A filing with no retrievable evidence behind it is a weak filing, however valid the number looks.

Where this actually gets hard

Read as a list of steps, filing a DDS looks like an afternoon’s data entry, and for a single clean estate consignment it can be. The difficulty is not any one screen. It is that the easy-looking parts each hide a way to lose a week: the access request that has to be validated before a deadline you did not budget for; the EORI that fails the statement at the very end; the geolocation that arrives from a cooperative in ten formats and none of them valid; and, underneath all of it, the deforestation assessment that the form takes on trust but an authority will not.

That last point is the one worth being honest about. TRACES will happily accept a statement whose underlying screening was wrong: a plot waved through that should have been flagged, or a shade-grown plot flagged that was never deforested. The system does not check; you declared it. Which is exactly why the value is not in clicking submit but in the work before it: sound plot data, a type-aware deforestation screen that can tell agroforestry management from real clearing, and a record you could defend.

That is the part we do. You send the origin data in whatever shape it is in; we turn it into valid geometry, screen every plot, file the statement in TRACES under your operator identity, and hand you the reference and verification numbers and the evidence file behind them. What we do not do (what no one honestly can) is take on the legal responsibility, which stays with you as the operator. We build a defensible statement; we do not sell a guarantee. The distinction is deliberate, and we keep it across the full importer guide.