The document loop

The four documents behind almost every retail EDI program — 850, 855, 856, 810 — and the 997 acknowledgments that confirm each one.

Strip away the acronyms and retail EDI is one loop, repeated for every order:

The four documents

• 850 — purchase order. The retailer says "send us this." It arrives as data, so nobody re-keys line items.
• 855 — acknowledgment. Your reply, line by line: accepted, changed, or rejected. Many programs put a deadline on it — 24 hours is common.
• 856 — advance ship notice. Sent before the truck arrives: what's in each carton, which carton is on which pallet. The retailer's warehouse receives your freight against it without opening everything. This is the document retailers police hardest.
• 810 — invoice. Your bill as data, matched automatically against the order and the ship notice. When all three tell the same story, you get paid without a human touching anything.

The 997 heartbeat

Every document in either direction is answered by a 997 functional acknowledgment — a receipt that says "arrived and parsed." EDISQ sends 997s for everything that arrives and tracks the ones owed to you, flagging any document your partner never acknowledged so silence doesn't become a chargeback.

Programs vary at the edges

Some programs add documents — 820 remittance, 852 sell-through, 940/945 for third-party warehouses — and every retailer has house rules inside each document. That's what partner-specific maps are for: the per-retailer requirements live in our trading partner directory, and the differences are EDISQ's job, not yours.