Mid-market suppliers pick Dynamics 365 Business Central because it runs the whole operation — orders, inventory, warehousing, finance — in one place. Which makes it the natural anchor for EDI: every document a retailer sends or expects corresponds to an object Business Central already manages. The integration's job is to keep those two worlds synchronized without anyone rekeying between them.
The mapping, object by object
Business Central's sales cycle aligns naturally with the retail document chain:
- An inbound 850 purchase order becomes a sales order, with the retailer's item numbers resolved to your BC items, ship-to codes resolved to customer ship-to addresses, and the PO reference stored for the round-trip.
- The 855 acknowledgment returns from the sales order — confirming lines, quantities, and dates to partners that expect a fast answer.
- Posting the sales shipment triggers the 856 ASN: the connector builds the shipment hierarchy and carton detail from the posted shipment and transmits before freight arrives, which is the timing retailers actually grade.
- The posted sales invoice becomes the 810, inheriting the PO number and shipped quantities so it clears three-way matching instead of aging in a deduction queue.
- Item availability can publish outbound as an 846 for partners and distributors that require inventory feeds.
Because each EDI event maps to a BC posting event, your team keeps working in Business Central exactly as before — the EDI happens as a side effect of the process, which is the definition of an integration that will actually get used.
What the connector owns
Three kinds of work live in the EDISQ layer so they don't live in your BC customizations. Translation: partner-specific X12 in and out, validated against each retailer's companion guide before transmission. Cross-referencing: items, units of measure, locations, and partner identifiers mapped once and applied everywhere. Choreography: 997 acknowledgments both directions, response-time deadlines tracked, and ship-confirm events turned into ASNs the moment they post. Compliance-heavy partners are the reason this matters — a Target program, for instance, ties deductions directly to ASN accuracy and invoice matching, and the validation layer is what keeps those documents clean at the source.
Standing it up
Implementation runs in a predictable arc. Connect EDISQ to your Business Central environment. Enable your first trading partner, which loads certified maps and that partner's rules. Build the cross-references — the retailer's item and location identifiers against your BC master data. Replay the partner's scenarios in the sandbox until order-to-invoice passes end to end, then go live with acknowledgment monitoring on. Suppliers typically hit this project when the first big-retailer PO makes portal-typing untenable; arriving before that PO does is considerably calmer.
Two implementation habits are worth adopting from the start. First, treat units of measure with suspicion: retailers order in eaches, cases, and pallets, and BC's unit conversions must agree with the partner's assumptions or quantities silently multiply. Second, decide early where exceptions surface — a rejected document should appear where your team already works, not in a separate console someone has to remember to check. Both are configuration decisions, and both are much cheaper to make before the first live order than after the first deduction.
Cost, without the enterprise markup
ERP-grade EDI has historically carried enterprise-grade invoices. EDISQ prices the Business Central integration like everything else it does: metered per document, first 25 each month at no charge, then a declining ladder from $0.50 to $0.10 with each rate applied only within its bracket. The integration itself, the certified partner maps, and AS2/SFTP/VAN connectivity carry no fees — going live is a $100/month Production minimum applied entirely to usage, with the first live partner included and each additional one a flat $50/month. Details and volume math on the pricing page, with connector specifics on the Business Central integration page.
FAQ
Does Business Central include EDI out of the box?
No. Business Central provides the ERP objects — sales orders, shipments, invoices — but not the X12 translation, partner maps, or connectivity. An EDI platform like EDISQ supplies that layer and posts into BC's standard flow.
What triggers the 856 from Business Central?
Shipment confirmation. When the shipment is posted in BC, the connector assembles the ASN from that shipment's lines and packing detail and transmits it to the partner immediately.
Which retailers can I trade with once connected?
Any of the 2,200+ partners in the EDISQ directory — each enabled partner loads its own certified maps and compliance validation on top of the same Business Central integration.