A Chinese SDS is not a European SDS in another language. Translating a document written for the Chinese market does not make it compliant in the EU. The free audit tells you which parts actually have to change.
Free · one card per company · report in 14 calendar days
Six words that stop a sale, and almost never come with a reason attached. Section 2? Section 3? The classification? The transport entry? The language? The identity of the substance? The whole document?
Do not guess, and do not send a new one hoping it lands. Send us the sheet and the rejection message. Fourteen calendar days later you have nine checks, three states, and the article each failure fails against.
Why a sheet that looks fine gets rejected
A rejected sheet is rarely empty. It is usually complete, well formatted, and written against a regulation that has since been amended, or against the requirements of a different jurisdiction that happens to use the same sixteen-section skeleton.
The document reads as professional. The register reads it as wrong.
The most common causes, in the order they get found:
The classification came from the wrong source. Where a harmonised entry exists at Union level, that entry is binding. Two ways to fail: classify more leniently than it, which is unlawful; or copy the union of every public self-classification notification, which fills your sheet with hazards your product does not have and raises your customer’s transport and storage costs for no reason. The second failure is more common and does more commercial damage, because it makes you look careless rather than dishonest — and careless is harder to recover from.
The supplemental statements are absent. The EU applies additional hazard statements that do not exist in other GHS implementations. No template written outside the EU will ever produce them, which makes their absence a signature rather than an oversight — and a compliance officer who has seen it before recognises it in four seconds.
Section 8 cites a number with no legal basis. The sheet must state the destination country’s own occupational exposure limit and name the act it comes from. National limits genuinely differ from EU indicative values, sometimes by a factor of two, and a sheet carrying only the EU figure gives an employer legally wrong data for their workplace risk assessment.
Section 14 does not match what you actually ship. Where a substance has form-dependent entries — a gas and a solution, for instance — the sheet has to use the entry for the commercial form in the drum. This is the quietest error in the document and the most expensive, because a carrier compares it against the shipping papers.
Section 15 describes another country’s law. A section 15 citing regulations from outside the EU is an instant marker, and it hides exactly the information your European buyer legally needs before purchase.
Section 14 is incomplete. A buyer whose freight forwarder cannot book the shipment will refuse the document before reading the rest of it. The UN number, the packing group and the ADR transport class have to be present and consistent with the classification; a sheet that omits them, or carries a UN number that contradicts Section 2, leaves the goods on hold at the point of dispatch.
Identifiers are missing from Section 3. The EC number belongs next to the CAS number for every component that has one. Its absence is the single most common reason a German or Dutch distributor returns a sheet that is otherwise complete.
The document is an MSDS, not an SDS. A sheet written to a national format outside the Union — still widely called an MSDS — does not satisfy a European customer, whatever its quality. Inside the EU the format is set by Regulation (EU) 2020/878, which amended Annex II of REACH and applies without exception to sheets supplied here.
The nine checks
Format · Language · Classification against the harmonised entry · Supplemental statements · Pictogram and signal-word consistency · Exposure limits with a stated legal basis · Personal protective equipment specificity · Transport entry · Section 15 content and UFI where a mixture requires one.
Each returns PASS, FAIL or NOT VERIFIABLE, with a source link on every line. You never receive “your card is 62% compliant”. You receive: three of nine failed, two could not be verified, four passed — and the article each failure fails against.
One card is free. A pattern needs more than one.
The free audit reads one card per company, and the report reaches you within 14 calendar days of our receiving the required documents. One sheet shows an incident. It does not show whether the defect lives in your template.
That is what the priced tiers are for. A finding that repeats across a set is not an accident — it is built into the system you generate documentation from, and every other sheet in your catalogue almost certainly has it too. Ten cards are €490 in three working days, twenty-five are €990 in five, fifty are €1,900 in ten, and the fee is credited against any documentation order placed within sixty days.
When that happens we write probably every card in your catalogue carries this defect — probably, not certainly, because we read the set you sent, not all of them.
Send the sheet and the rejection
If the rejection came with a longer list of documents you do not recognise, the request decoder maps every item to what it actually is. If you are not sure which service answers your situation, the comparison table names one per row.
If we find nothing
We write that we found nothing. A clean audit is a legitimate outcome and we have no commercial interest in inventing defects — the whole product depends on the report being worth reading, which it stops being the moment it always finds something.
Questions people ask before they order
My customer rejected the sheet but did not say why. Can you still find the problem?
Usually, yes. The audit runs nine checks against the register and returns PASS, FAIL or NOT VERIFIABLE for each, naming the article the failure fails against. That gives you something specific to answer with, instead of a second sheet that might fail for the same reason.
Why was my safety data sheet rejected?
Most often for one of four reasons: the classification in section 2 was read against the wrong source where a harmonised entry exists, the EC number is missing next to the CAS number in section 3, section 14 omits the UN number, packing group or ADR transport class, or the label pictograms contradict the classification the sheet itself states. Each of those is checkable against the register rather than a matter of opinion.
My buyer will not accept our MSDS. Is an MSDS still valid for a European customer?
Not on its own. A sheet written to a national format outside the Union, still widely called an MSDS, does not meet the European requirement whatever its quality. Inside the EU the format is set by Regulation (EU) 2020/878, which amended Annex II of REACH. The document has to be built against that, not translated into it.
The shipment is on hold. What in section 14 usually causes that?
A missing or inconsistent transport identifier. If the UN number, the packing group or the ADR transport class is absent, or the UN number contradicts the classification in section 2, the freight forwarder cannot book the load and the goods stop at dispatch. The audit reports each of those separately, so you know which line to answer.
What happens if the audit finds nothing wrong?
Then it says so, and it still costs nothing. A documented clean result is a defensible thing to hold when a customer asks again. We do not invent defects to sell a repair.
Should I send the rejection message as well as the sheet?
Send it if you have it. The wording of a rejection often points straight at the section that failed, and it tells us which framework the customer is reading against.
Is one sheet enough, or do you want three?
One sheet shows an incident. Three show whether the defect lives in the template you generate everything from. If it does, fixing the template fixes your whole catalogue at once, and fixing card by card is the most expensive road there is.
Do you rewrite the sheet, or only tell me what is wrong?
The audit only tells you. Rewriting is a separate order: a working draft at €49.99, or a card read section by section and signed by a competent person at €249.99. The audit fee, where one was paid, is credited against it within sixty days.