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EDI 846: the inventory advice
The 846 reports your availability: which items, how many, sometimes from which warehouse. It goes out on a schedule the trading partner sets, and their systems decide what to order and what to list from it.
On dropship programmes it carries the most weight, because there the retailer is selling stock that sits on your floor, sight unseen.
What the document carries
Item identifiers and quantities available, on the partner's clock. Some guidelines want a full catalog sweep, others only changes; some want one national number, others availability by ship-from location.
The number it should carry is a decision before it is a data point. On-hand is what the warehouse holds; available to promise is what is left after existing commitments. Feeding the first when the partner sells against the feed is how the same unit gets sold twice.
How Odoo feeds it
Odoo already tracks quantity on hand and free quantity per warehouse, so the 846 is a scheduled read of numbers the system maintains anyway. The configuration decides which warehouses count, whether a safety buffer is held back, and the cadence each partner's guideline demands.
The buffer is the commercial decision inside the technical one. Publishing every last unit maximises what they can sell and leaves nothing for a rush order from anywhere else; the right holdback is a conversation with whoever owns the channel.
Where it goes wrong
Staleness. A feed that runs daily describes yesterday, and on a fast mover the gap between the feed and the floor becomes orders for stock that is already gone. Every one of those turns into a cancellation the partner's scorecard remembers.
The cadence and the buffer have to match how fast the stock actually moves, and revisiting both after the first months of live data is part of running the document properly.
The rest of the set
One document never travels alone. The mandate that asks for this one names its siblings, and the questions repeat: direction, mapping, and what happens when it is late or wrong.
Every code in plain language: the X12 catalog. What a late or wrong document costs: chargebacks and deductions. Who mandates and how it is enforced: the US programmes and the Canadian ones. How the documents fit into purchasing, fulfilment and accounting: EDI across the supply chain.
Start with the letter
The Requirement Check takes two answers: who mandated you and where you stand today. You get back a plain readout of which documents that customer asks for and what has to change inside your Odoo. It is free and it commits you to nothing.
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