Chapter 4. Advanced EDI

Table of Contents

1. Writing queries to collect the data
1.1. Quotes
1.2. Sales Orders
1.3. Invoices
2. Creating an EDI Profile that can be shared
2.1. Adding Quotes to the EDI Profile
2.2. Adding Sales Orders and Invoices to the EDI Profile
3. Entering the required Customer data
3.1. Creating Customer Characteristics for FTP
3.2. Defining Characteristic values for each Customer
3.3. Attaching the EDI Profile to each Customer
4. Testing

In this chapter we will explore the following aspects of EDI configuration:

Note

All of the instructions in this chapter assume you have already completed the installation steps and that the Batch Manager is running and configured properly to work with a functioning email account. We also assume familiarity with xTuple ERP basic business process flows.

Caution

Some of the information provided in this section is technical in nature. If you have trouble following the steps described here, please contact your system administrator for assistance.

We'll start with the desire to send quotes, sales order acknowledgements, and invoices electronically in CSV files to two different Customers. CSV stands for "comma-separated values". This is a standard text format that can be opened by a number of different programs, including most spreadsheet applications and xTuple's CSVImp program.

To accomplish this goal we need to go through the following steps:

  1. Write queries to collect the data we want to send

  2. Create an EDI Profile that can be used for multiple customers and all three document types

  3. Enter the required Customer data and attach the EDI Profile