EDI Purchase Order and Invoice Exchange

The problem

If you sell into a large retailer, distributor, grocery chain or a government buying group, EDI is not optional. It is written into the vendor agreement. The buyer sends you an 850 purchase order over AS2 or SFTP and expects an 855 purchase order acknowledgement inside a contractual window, an 856 advance ship notice keyed to the exact carton and pallet labels before the truck arrives at the dock, and an 810 invoice that reconciles line for line against the original PO. Miss the window, get the ASN wrong, or send an invoice that does not match, and you get a chargeback.

Zoho gives you nothing for this. Zoho Inventory has Sales Orders, Packages and Shipments. Zoho Books has Invoices. Neither speaks X12 or EDIFACT, neither knows what a GS control number is, and there is no native way to poll an AS2 or SFTP endpoint on the trading partner's schedule. What normally happens is that somebody opens the buyer's web portal, reads the PO on screen, and retypes it into Zoho Inventory. Then they retype the shipment back into the portal. Every transposed digit becomes a chargeback, and the process does not survive volume growth or a second trading partner with a different specification.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build a document exchange bridge that sits between your trading partner connection and your Zoho org. It is not a generic connector you configure yourself. We map it to the specific partner specifications you trade against, using your item numbers, your Books organization, and your warehouse structure.

Inbound 850 to Zoho Sales Order

A scheduled service picks up inbound interchanges from your SFTP drop or your AS2 mailbox, parses the X12 envelope (ISA, GS, ST), and validates the transaction set against the partner's implementation guide before anything touches Zoho. Valid documents are written into Zoho Inventory as Sales Orders through the Zoho Inventory REST API, with the buyer's PO number carried into the reference field, requested ship dates mapped to the shipment date, and buyer item numbers translated to your Zoho item SKUs through a cross-reference table we build as a Zoho Creator application. Documents that fail validation land in an exception queue rather than silently creating a bad order.

Outbound 855 acknowledgement

A Deluge custom function on the Sales Order record, plus a workflow rule, generates the 855 back to the partner. We implement accept, reject and accept-with-change at the line level, so a substitution or a partial-quantity confirmation is expressed correctly rather than being forced into a blanket accept.

Outbound 856 advance ship notice

The ASN is built from the Zoho Inventory Package and Shipment records, so what you tell the buyer is what you actually packed. We construct the hierarchical loop structure the partner requires (shipment, order, pack, item), attach SSCC-18 carton identifiers, and produce GS1-128 shipping labels that match the pack level referenced in the document. Carrier, tracking number, BOL and ship date are pulled from the Shipment record.

Outbound 810 invoice

When an Invoice is created in Zoho Books, a custom function assembles the 810 from the Books Invoice, applying the partner's required allowance and charge codes, terms and discount segments, and remittance details. Where your Books organization is configured for GST or VAT, the tax lines are carried into the document in the format the partner's guide expects, and we reconcile the invoice back to the originating 850 so quantity or price variances are caught before transmission rather than by a chargeback notice weeks later.

Control, acknowledgement and audit

We implement 997 or CONTRL functional acknowledgement handling in both directions, sequential ISA and GS control number management with no reuse, and a Zoho Creator control panel showing every document, its envelope numbers, its raw payload and its current state. Zoho Flow handles alerting so a failed transmission or a missing 997 raises a notification rather than sitting unnoticed.

Who this is for

Suppliers and brands selling into large retail, grocery, pharmacy, industrial distribution or public sector buyers who run their business day to day in Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books, and who have received a vendor EDI specification they are contractually required to meet. It suits companies trading with one to a handful of partners where a full enterprise EDI stack is disproportionate but manual portal keying has stopped being viable.

How delivery works

Scoping call. We go through the actual partner implementation guides you have been sent, the transaction sets in scope, your connection method (AS2, SFTP, or a VAN mailbox), your Zoho edition and Books organization structure, and how your item numbering relates to the buyer's.

Fixed quote. You get a written scope listing each transaction set, each partner, the mapping rules and the exception handling, with a fixed price and a delivery date. Nothing starts until you approve it.

Build. We develop the parsers, mappings, Deluge functions, Creator control application and Zoho Flow orchestration against a test Zoho org, and validate output documents against the partner guide.

Install in test, then production. We install into your sandbox or test Zoho org first and run end-to-end cycles using the partner's test interchanges. Once you and your trading partner sign off on the test transmissions, we install into your production Zoho org and stay on the line for the first live documents.

Support. A defined support window follows go-live, covering defects, partner specification clarifications, and adjustments to mapping discovered against real production traffic.

This is built to order. Nothing here is downloaded and switched on. Typical lead time is one working week from approved quote, depending on the number of partners and transaction sets in scope.