EDI Documents

Aptean EDI  •  Article  •  4/29/2023  •  4 min

You can manually perform EDI activities from the following documents:

  • Sales Orders, Posted Sales Shipments, Posted Sales Invoices, and Posted Sales Credit Memos
  • Purchase Orders
  • Transfer Orders
  • Warehouse Shipments
  • Inventory Picks

In addition, you can view the EDI related information, from the following documents:

  • Sales Credit Memos and Blanket Orders
  • Purchase Invoices
  • Posted Transfer Shipments
  • Warehouse Receipts and Posted Warehouse Receipts

However, you cannot manually perform any activities on them.

This section explains how to process EDI for a sales order, and the same applies to other EDI-supported documents.

To process a sales order as an EDI transaction, you must indicate it as an EDI order by selecting the EDI Sales Document field on the EDI FastTab of the sales order document.

Enabling this field allows the program to process EDI transactions for the sales order, whereas disabling it excludes the document from EDI processing. You only need to perform this action for manually-created documents that require EDI processing. Sales orders created via inbound EDI activities are automatically identified as EDI sales documents.


The information contained within the inbound EDI activity that results in the creation of a sales order may be required to transmit outbound activities from the document. If a manually-created document does not have the necessary data, enabling the EDI Sales Document field and attempting to then process EDI transactions from it may result in a failure.

The other fields on the EDI FastTab are informational and cannot be edited:

Field Description
EDI Received Date/Time Displays the date and time that the sales document was created from an inbound EDI activity.
EDI Sent Date/Time Displays the date and time at which a sales acknowledgement was sent from the sales order. Sales acknowledgements can be sent either manually by a user or as part of an automated process.
EDI Status Indicates whether the document is open or released for EDI activity. An EDI sales acknowledgement cannot be transmitted from an order unless the document is released. The release process may be manually performed by a user, or can be automated depending on the related EDI port’s configuration.

Every line on a sales document must have a corresponding EDI reference line if it is to be properly transmitted as part of an outbound activity. When document lines are created from an inbound EDI activity, this information is automatically assigned by the application. When a document line is created manually, however, this reference is not automatically established. Depending on how the outbound activity has been configured, this missing link may result in a failure in EDI processing. To facilitate the establishment of this link, an EDI REF. LINE NO. field has been added to sales lines:

In this field, you can assign or modify the EDI reference number for each sales line. Again, note that this should typically be necessary only in situations where a manually-created sales document line needs to be configured for outbound EDI processing.

Once a sales order has been approved for EDI processing, there are a number of different activities that can be performed. These features are accessed through the action bar by clicking Actions > EDI and selecting one of the EDI activities:

Action Description
Linked Documents Opens the EDI Message Linkage window, which displays a list of all EDI documents related to the sales order. You can then select a line in this window and, in the Process group of the Home tab, click Show to view the source document.
Process It is possible to trigger the processing of EDI warehouse shipping orders, EDI sales acknowledgements, and EDI change acknowledgements from the sales order. The date and time at which an EDI sales acknowledgement is sent is automatically entered in the EDI Sent Date/Time field on the EDI FastTab.
Release Releases the sales order for automatic processing of an EDI sales acknowledgement. When a sales order is released for EDI, the value in the EDI Status field on the EDI FastTab is updated accordingly.
Show Archived Order If any EDI archive records have been created for the order, this option will display them.