Direct route

Direct EDI over AS2 or SFTP, straight from Odoo

Direct means your Odoo exchanges X12 documents with your customer over a transport you run, with no platform sitting in the middle and no fee per document.

It is the cheaper shape to run and the more demanding shape to stand up. This page is about which of those matters more in your case.

What direct means

Your customer publishes a guideline naming the documents they require and the transport they will accept. On a direct route you meet that transport yourself. Documents leave your Odoo, reach their system, and their responses come back the same way.

With no third party in the path there is no monthly subscription and no charge per document. There is also no third party absorbing the parts of this that go wrong, which is the whole trade.

Your customer

issues the guideline

Your Odoo

meets the transport itself

What you take on

  • A transport that has to stay up

    AS2 exchanges certificates with your customer and those certificates expire, so somebody has to know the date and renew ahead of it. SFTP is simpler to run and its credentials still rotate.

  • A testing cycle with each customer

    Every trading partner runs their own, on their schedule, against their own guideline, and it finishes when they say it finishes. Somebody on your side has to sit with it until they do.

  • One relationship per customer

    A second customer is a second guideline, a second test cycle and a second set of parameters.

When this is the wrong call, which is often

  • If your customer named a platform

    What that platform costs and what it covers are worth establishing early. When it comes out cheaper in total, the question stops being how to build direct and becomes whether to build it at all.

  • If you expect several trading partners quickly

    A platform absorbs the per-partner onboarding that direct makes you repeat. If one customer is most of your volume and the guideline permits it, direct stops the per-document toll for good.

  • If nobody will own a certificate renewal date

    Direct fails on an ordinary Tuesday, and it fails quietly. The certificate carries an expiry date printed on it, and when that date passes the exchange stops with nothing announcing it.

The Odoo half is the same either way

Whichever transport carries the document, the work on your side does not change: which fields the order lands on, what your item numbers have to look like against the ones your customer uses, and what happens in your warehouse the morning a document arrives malformed.

That half is where the time goes, and it is the same job on a direct route as on a platform route.

The two routes are set out side by side on the home page, and the documents themselves are explained on the transaction codes page.

Bring the guideline

Thirty minutes, Mountain Time, with the person who would do the work. Come with the document list and the transport your customer named. You will leave knowing whether direct is the cheaper shape for you or whether the platform they suggested already covers it.

Book a 30-minute call