What is an EDI guide?

You and your trading partner must agree on the exact format for each transaction type you plan to exchange. In practice, the larger trading partner typically dictates a format that the other trading partner must follow.

These requirements are defined in what the EDI industry calls an implementation guide, also known as a companion guide, EDI reference guide, or just a guide. An implementation guide is similar to a Schema definition, with a few peculiarities specific to EDI.

You need an implementation guide for each transaction type you plan to exchange with your partner. For example, you need an implementation guide for a purchase order and a separate guide for an invoice.

​

Validation

Implementation guides include information like expected fields, data types and sizes, and which fields are required. You can use these details to validate incoming and outgoing EDI documents.

​

Stedi guides vs. standard guides

Standard EDI implementation guides are typically captured in a static format, like PDF, CSV, or even Word document files. In contrast, Stedi guides display EDI requirements as interactive web pages with built-in validation.

Stedi guides are also machine-readable, so Stedi can use them to read and write EDI documents according to each partner’s EDI requirements. This is why we recommend always selecting a guide for each transaction setting in your integration.

The Stedi Network contains hundreds of Stedi guides for popular trading partners that you can import into your Stedi account and use in your integration for free.

​

Base specifications

All EDI implementation guides are customized versions of a base specification.

There are several EDI standards that provide base specifications. The most common are X12 and EDIFACT. The EDI Reference documentation contains a full list of base specifications for each standard.

• X12 transaction sets
• EDIFACT messages

A base specification is designed by a standard body to cover all possible use cases for a given transaction. For example, the base specification for ship notices contains fields for every type of ship notice you could ever encounter.

Base specifications are far too generic for day-to-day use. Instead, you and your trading partner must agree on what that transaction set should contain and then adjust the base specification accordingly. The result is an implementation guide, which contains only a subset of segments from the base specification.

Implementation guides can have other differences from the base specification as well. For example, some segments that are optional in the base specification may be marked as mandatory in the implementation guide.

Each trading partner has their own implementation guide for each type of transaction. For example, Home Depot, Walmart, and JCPenney all have separate implementation guides for the X12 850 Purchase Order.