Master air waybill data extraction turns a waybill document into a structured, validated record a system can use. There are four parts to it: intake, extraction, validation, and output. The part that decides whether the result is useful or risky is validation, which checks each field against real air-freight rules before anything trusts it.
Reading text off a document is the commoditized part now; plenty of tools do OCR. The harder problem with a MAWB is knowing whether what was read is correct. A confident read of the wrong digit is worse than a blank, because it looks trustworthy. The useful question is not what the document says, but which fields you can safely act on.
Intake
MAWBs arrive as scans, PDFs, phone photos, or email attachments. Intake normalizes all of it into something the pipeline can read, over the API or by email. Forward a waybill to a dedicated address and a result comes back; in the common case there is no portal and no manual upload step.
With , you can run this end-to-end MAWB extraction on your own waybills today.
Start hereExtraction
Extraction pulls the fields off the document: the AWB number, origin and destination, pieces, weight, nature of goods, charges. Each read carries a confidence score, because not every field is equally legible. That score feeds the next step. It is not the final word on whether a field is right.
Validation
This is the core of the work — checking each read against how air freight actually behaves, not just whether the characters were legible. A few of the checks that run on every document:
- AWB check digit (MOD-7) — the serial's last digit must equal the first seven modulo 7, so a transposed or misread number is caught, not trusted. A failure is a hard reject.
- Prefix belongs to the carrier — the airline prefix must be a real IATA prefix owned by the carrier actually on the flight; when the flight number and the prefix disagree, the document is flagged.
- Chargeable weight can't fall below gross — chargeable is the greater of actual and volumetric weight, so a chargeable below gross is physically impossible and gets flagged as a likely transpose. Wrong weight is wrong money for a forwarder.
- Routing resolves — origin and destination must be valid IATA airport or city codes, and the two can't be the same place.
- Duplicate copies are caught — a repeat AWB number is tagged as another copy of the same waybill, so one document isn't processed or billed twice.
A consolidation is also detected before anything reads the master as a single commodity. Every check resolves to one of three outcomes — clear (straight through), review (routed to a person), or reject (a hard failure like a bad check digit) — and confidence gets a reality check on top: a field can read with high confidence and still be wrong, and a field can read with low confidence and still be verified against a rule.
Output
What comes out is one validated record, available as JSON or XML over the API, as FWB/16 or FWB/17 EDI, and as CSV or XLSX. Every format reads from the same record, so they agree. Because validation has already run, most documents clear on their own and only the exceptions need a person. That is what exceptions-only review means in practice.