Outbound from you
EDI 855: the order acknowledgment
The 855 is your answer to the 850. Line by line it says accepted, changed or rejected: this quantity, this date, this substitution.
Buyers read it as a commitment. The quantities you acknowledge are the quantities their planners plan against, so the document is only as good as the availability it reports.
What the document carries
For each order line, an acknowledgment code and the values you are committing to: accept as ordered, accept with changes to quantity or date, or reject. The retailer's guideline sets a window for it, and their systems track whether you answered inside it.
It exists because a purchase order is a request. Stock runs out, dates slip, items retire. The 855 is the mechanism for saying so before a truck is expected, while a change still costs nothing.
How Odoo produces one honestly
An honest 855 reads what Odoo actually knows: the stock that is available to promise, the dates the warehouse can meet, the products that are active. The order confirmed in Odoo, with its real availability, is the source; the 855 is a report of it in the buyer's format.
The design decision is what happens on the lines Odoo cannot fill. Acknowledge short, propose a date, or hold for a person to decide. That rule is set per trading partner during configuration, and it is a commercial decision before it is a technical one.
Where it goes wrong
The tempting shortcut is acknowledging everything as ordered, automatically, because it always answers inside the window. It also confirms quantities nobody checked, and the gap between what you acknowledged and what you ship surfaces later as a shortage on their receiving dock.
A shortage declared on the 855 gets handled as planning, while a change still costs nothing. A shortage discovered at their receiving dock gets handled as a deduction. The document exists so it is the first one.
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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