When a 3PL finishes picking your order, one document determines whether the rest of your day goes smoothly: the EDI 945 Warehouse Shipping Advice. It is the warehouse's report back to you — the closing bracket around the 940 shipping order you sent — and nearly everything customer-facing that happens next is built on top of it.
What comes back from the warehouse
Structurally the 945 mirrors the order it answers, in warehouse-family segments. W06 identifies the shipment and ties it to your original order number and the customer PO. N1 loops confirm the parties, W27 carries the carrier and routing actually used, and MAN segments hold carton or pallet serial numbers where the warehouse labels freight. The heart of the document is the W12 detail loop: line by line, what was actually shipped — which can and does differ from what the 940 requested.
Those differences are the point. A short pick, a substituted lot, a split shipment across two trucks: the 945 is where reality gets recorded. Treat it as a rubber stamp and you'll invoice for goods that never left the building.
Warehouses also differ in how much detail they return. Some send carton-level content with serial numbers ready for ASN reuse; others confirm only line quantities. What your 3PL can populate determines how much of the retail ASN can be built automatically, so the 945's content is worth negotiating when you sign the warehouse agreement — not after the first chargeback.
One document, three jobs
A well-integrated 945 does three things the moment it lands:
- Builds the customer's ASN. The 856 ship notice your retailer demands should be generated from the 945's shipped quantities and carton data — not from the order — because the retailer's receiving dock will scan what physically arrived. Retail programs deduct for ASN inaccuracy, and an ASN built from intentions rather than the 945 is how those deductions happen.
- Releases the invoice. Billing from the 945 means you invoice what shipped. Buyers match invoices against receipts; invoicing the ordered quantity after a short pick is a guaranteed short-pay.
- Updates inventory. The shipped quantities decrement your on-hand at the 3PL, keeping your ERP's picture of remote stock honest between cycle counts. (Adjustments that aren't shipments — damage, shrink, count corrections — arrive separately on the 947.)
Latency is the silent killer
Everything above assumes the 945 is processed fast. The ASN deadline most retailers enforce — transmitted before freight arrival, often at truck departure — applies to you, and you can't send an accurate 856 until the 945 arrives and posts. A 3PL that batches 945s to a nightly window, or an integration that polls a mailbox every few hours, quietly converts on-time shipments into late ASNs. When you negotiate with a warehouse, 945-at-ship-confirm belongs in the service agreement next to pick accuracy. Measure it, too: the lag between the warehouse's physical ship time and the 945's arrival is a number you can trend, and it predicts ASN compliance better than any other metric a 3PL will give you.
Wiring it in
EDISQ treats the 940/945 pair as one configured loop, described in depth in our 3PL solution: the 945 posts into your ERP as a shipment confirmation, triggers the retailer-facing ASN automatically, and feeds the invoice — with the item and location cross-references maintained in the map, not in anyone's memory. If your warehouse also sends inventory snapshots, those flow alongside as 846 documents into the same integration.
Cost scales with traffic and nothing else. Under per-document pricing, a 945 is a single document: you spend the month's first 25 documents free, then pay from $0.50 down to $0.10 apiece as tiers fill, billed marginally. No mapping or setup fee sits underneath — the 3PL is an additional live partner at a flat $50/month — so the confirmation loop that keeps your ASNs honest runs for cents per shipment.
FAQ
What does the EDI 945 confirm?
That your warehouse shipped an order: which items and quantities actually left, in which cartons, on which carrier, and when. It answers the 940 shipping order you sent.
Is the 945 the same as the 856?
No. The 945 flows from your 3PL to you; the 856 flows from you to your customer. In practice the 945 provides the data the 856 is built from, but they are different documents for different audiences.
Why do shipped quantities on the 945 matter so much?
Because the 945 reflects reality. If the warehouse short-picked, the 945 says so — and your ASN, invoice, and inventory records must follow the 945, not the original order, or every downstream document mismatches.
What does a 945 cost to receive?
One document on the EDISQ meter — 25 free per month, then from $0.50 with volume tiers down to $0.10. Connectivity to the 3PL over AS2, SFTP, or VAN is included.