Ask what the house air waybill format looks like and you'll usually get a picture of the IATA air waybill: the boxed face with shipper and consignee at the top, routing in the middle, and the goods description and charges below. That's the master's layout. House bills are a different story. A house air waybill (HAWB) is the document a forwarder issues for one shipper's goods inside a consolidation, and forwarders produce it in whatever layout their own system prints.
For anyone who receives house bills (import desks, handling agents, customs brokers, the cargo teams on both ends of a consolidation), that variety is the whole problem. You can't read a HAWB the way you read a master, because there isn't one HAWB format to learn. There are at least three.
The three shapes a house bill arrives in
In one sample set of 21 house documents, the layouts sorted cleanly into three shapes:
- An IATA-style AWB face (2 of 21). The house bill is printed on the standard air waybill layout, so at a glance it looks exactly like a master. The difference is in the numbers: it carries a house number and refers to the master it travels under.
- A forwarder manifest carrying one house (about 13 of 21). The most common shape by far. The page is the forwarder's own document — often titled Air Freight Manifest or Consolidation Manifest — but it describes a single house shipment. Every forwarder places the fields differently, and labels vary from one to the next.
- A manifest carrying two or more houses on one page (about 6 of 21). This is a consolidation manifest in the literal sense: several house shipments listed together, each with its own house number, shipper, consignee and goods line, all under one master.
The title on the page doesn't tell you which shape you have. A document headed "Consolidation Manifest" can carry one house or several. What tells you is the content: above all, how many distinct house numbers appear on it. For the master-versus-house relationship itself, see MAWB vs HAWB: what a consolidation actually is.
What every house bill has in common
If the layouts differ, what's left to rely on? To find out, we took a set of 75 real single-house pages and analysed each one for 27 candidate fields, counting how often each field actually carried a value. The result is a clear ranking of what a HAWB format reliably contains, and what it usually doesn't.
Four fields appeared on every one of the 75 pages: the house AWB number, the shipper, the consignee and the nature of goods. Pieces and gross weight were missing from a single page each. The master AWB number — the link from the house back to the master it rode under — was on 96% of pages.
Below that, the routing fields thin out. The flight number was on 85% of pages and the destination airport on 81%. The issuing forwarder, the flight date and the origin airport sat around 75–77%. Numbers in that band deserve some caution: forwarders label the same idea differently, and an origin printed only as "Port of Loading", for example, is easy to count as absent when it's really there under another name.
Then the long tail. The issue date appeared on about half the pages (52%), the carrier on 43%, a customs, AMS or ITN reference on 33%, and the HS code and volume on 27% each. Notify party (21%) and Incoterms (19%) were rarer still.
The most striking gap is money. On an IATA-style face, the charges block is a large part of the document. On house pages, charges were close to absent: freight charges and currency on 5% of pages, declared value on 7%, chargeable weight on 9%. A house bill schema that expects a full charges section will spend most of its time returning empty fields.
With , the document type and the number of house bills on a page are settled before any field is read.
Start hereWhy template-based capture breaks on house bills
Template or zonal OCR works by reading fixed regions of a known layout: the shipper is in this box, the weight is in that one. It holds up on masters because the IATA face is consistent from one airline to the next. On house bills there is no single house air waybill format to anchor to. Each forwarder's manifest needs its own template, a single-house page and a multi-house page need different ones, and a new forwarder means building yet another. The layouts outnumber the templates anyone is willing to maintain.
That's why house bills are a job for document understanding rather than coordinates: reading the page for what each value is rather than where it sits. It's the same reason AWB data capture is more than OCR: turning a page into a validated record means knowing what kind of document it is and what each value means.
What a house bill schema should look like
The census points to three design rules for anyone extracting house bill data:
- Keep it lean. Build the schema around the fields that are actually there — house number, parties, goods, pieces, weight, master number, routing — rather than copying the master's full field set, most of which a house page never carries.
- Anchor on the master AWB number. It's on nearly every house page, and it's what connects the house to the master the airline flies against. A house record that loses that link can't be reconciled with the consolidation it belongs to. The same pairing shows up in electronic messaging, where FHL carries the house waybills and FWB the master.
- Classify before you extract. A page with several house numbers is a consolidation manifest, not a house bill with an unusually long goods line. Recognize it as such first. Read it as a single house and the shippers, consignees and weights of different shipments get blended into one record that describes none of them.
Where AWBGuru fits
AWBGuru classifies the document type and counts the houses on a page before extraction begins, so a consolidation manifest is recognized as one instead of being read as a single house bill. House bill extraction is coming next; for the details of what it involves, see house air waybill data extraction.
Whatever tool you use, the order holds: know which of the three shapes you're holding, confirm how many houses are on the page, then read the fields every HAWB format actually shares.