Getting started

What EDI actually is, what EDISQ does with it, and what you need before your first document — the five-minute version.

Most people arrive here holding a retailer's EDI mandate. This guide explains what that mandate is really asking for, what EDISQ does about it, and exactly what happens between signing up and trading live documents. No prior EDI knowledge assumed.

What EDI actually is

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is how large retailers exchange business documents with their suppliers as structured data instead of PDFs and emails. A purchase order, a ship notice, an invoice — each is a standardized machine-readable file (the X12 format in North America), delivered over an agreed connection, acknowledged automatically.

Retailers mandate it because it removes humans from a process that runs thousands of times a day. For you, the mandate boils down to: receive our documents in our format, send yours back in our format, over our connection, on our deadlines.

What EDISQ does

EDISQ sits between your trading partners and you as a translation and compliance layer:

Raw X12 arrives from your partner's system; you see a readable order. You confirm, ship, and invoice in plain forms (or straight from your business system); your partner receives spec-perfect X12 back. Validation against your partner's rules happens before anything transmits, so formatting errors are caught on our side of the wall, not by your retailer's compliance team.

What you need before you start

• Your mandate letter or vendor packet, if the retailer sent one. It names the documents and deadlines — and your retailer's page in our trading partner directory decodes what their program actually requires.
• A free account at app.edisq.com — the sandbox is free and unlimited, no card.
• Nothing else. No software to install, no VAN contract, no EDI staff.

Where to go next

Read the document loop to understand the four documents nearly every retail program uses, then your path to live for the exact steps from here to certified.