It was 2017. I was sitting at my desk on my first real day in trade compliance, staring at a screen full of product descriptions, six-digit codes, and a tariff schedule that seemed to stretch into infinity.
I had no idea that, nearly a decade later, I would have classified close to one million commodities by hand, by tool, by every system imaginable across some of the most demanding industries on the planet.
I’m Surajit Roy, Co-Founder of TariffWolf. What follows is the story of how that decade of work shaped what we are building today and why we believe HS classification belongs inside a spreadsheet, not outside it.
A Decade Across Industries
Over the past ten years, my journey took me through worlds that, on the surface, had nothing in common.
I classified products for an e-commerce giant where catalogs grew faster than anyone could keep up with. I worked inside one of the world’s top internet companies, where every shipment had to clear customs across dozens of jurisdictions. I sat with automobile manufacturers untangling part numbers that read like a foreign language. And I worked with one of the oldest freight forwarding services in the trade where compliance wasn’t just a checkbox but a craft passed down across generations.
Different industries. Different stakes. Different tools.
Some companies had built proprietary classification systems from the ground up. Others relied on the well-known names the GTS, the GTM, the enterprise platforms that promise to do everything. Each one had its own interface, its own logic, its own learning curve, its own quirks.
But one strange thing kept showing up that quietly nagged at me for years.
Pick a time on the calendar that loads next — no email back-and-forth.
The Spreadsheet That Refused to Leave
No matter which company I joined, no matter how sophisticated the in-house tool, no matter how many millions had been spent on the latest enterprise platform every classifier I met, including myself, always had a spreadsheet open on the side.
The expensive tool would be running in one window. The spreadsheet would be running in the other.
Why?
Because spreadsheets are how classifiers actually think. We compare. We sort. We filter. We bulk-edit. We track exceptions. We slice data sideways to spot patterns the “official” tool was never built to show us.
The enterprise systems were where the data lived. The spreadsheet was where the work happened.
That observation became the seed of everything we are building today.
Why We Brought Classification Into the Spreadsheet
If the spreadsheet is where the work already happens, why are we forcing classifiers to leave it?
That question became the foundation of TariffWolf.
So we built it. Not as another platform to log into. Not as another tool to learn. We built classification intelligence that lives inside the spreadsheet itself, accessible through a single formula:
=TWHSCODE (‘Product Description’,’Country of Destination’)
Type it in a cell. Pass in your product description. The HS code appears next to it.
That’s the workflow. That’s the entire learning curve.
This Is Not Another Lookup Formula
Here is where we want to be very clear, because this is the part that matters most.
Traditional spreadsheet formulas like VLOOKUP, XLOOKUP, INDEX/MATCH — these are lookup systems. They find a value that already exists in a table you have prepared. They are powerful, but they are passive. They retrieve. They do not think.
=TWHSCODE is not a lookup formula.
It is classification intelligence, delivered through the spreadsheet interface. When you call it on a product description, we are not searching through a static table on your sheet. We are reading the description, understanding the commodity, weighing it against the structure of the Harmonized System, and returning the code that fits.
This is the distinction that defines us:
“Traditional formulas look things up. TariffWolf classifies.”
A lookup needs a pre-built answer key. Classification intelligence does not. It works the way an experienced human classifier works except it does it at the pace of a formula recalculation.
We Are Not a Traditional GTM or GTS SaaS
We want to be equally clear about what we are not.
We are not a traditional Global Trade Management or Global Trade Services platform. We are not asking you to migrate your data, restructure your processes, run a six-month implementation, or train your team on yet another dashboard.
We are classification intelligence for global trade compliance. Focused. Specialized. Built around the single hardest problem in the workflow getting the HS code right and delivered in the place classifiers already trust.
The big GTM and GTS systems try to do everything. We do one thing, and we do it where the work actually happens.
What This Means in Practice
Once the add-on is installed, classification stops being a project and starts being a function literally. You write =TWHSCODE the way you’d write SUM, and the HS code appears in the cell next to your product description.
Speed? Roughly 10 items per minute.
Multiply that across a catalog. Multiply that across a team. Multiply that across a year. The hours saved aren’t small they are the difference between drowning in classification backlog and actually having time to think about the harder calls, the edge cases, the exceptions that genuinely need human judgment.
And because it lives inside the spreadsheet your team already knows, there is nothing to relearn. For a professional who changes organizations every few years and most of us do that is not just a feature. That is freedom.
Built by Classifiers, for Classifiers
We did not build TariffWolf from a product manager’s wishlist.
We built it from a million rows of frustration. From a decade of switching companies and re-learning tools that never quite fit the way the work actually happens. From watching brilliant classifiers spend their first month at a new job clicking through onboarding wizards instead of doing the job they were hired to do.
If you have ever kept a spreadsheet open next to your “real” classification tool you already understand why we exist.
TariffWolf is the tool we wished someone had built ten years ago.
So we built it.
Welcome to classification intelligence that finally lives where you do.
— Surajit Roy, Co-Founder, TariffWolf