Watching it run
The flow tracker
On the order, not in a log. Every document that order produced or received, in the order it happened, each with its own state.
Almost every question about EDI is about one order. Did they get the confirmation. Was the invoice accepted. Why has the customer not seen the despatch advice. The tracker answers those where the question is asked, on the order itself, without changing form.
Where it appears
| Document | Where the tracker is |
|---|---|
| Sales order | On the sales order |
| Purchase order | On the purchase order |
| Project invoice | On the project invoice |
| Free text invoice | On the free text invoice |
It sits on the header where the work is done, and not on the posted journals. A packing slip journal is a record of something that happened; the order is where a person goes to find out what is going on.
What a card says
One card per document, in the order things happened. Each carries the document type, which direction it went, when, and a state. Open one and you get the message behind it: the identifiers, the references, the wire file, and the receipts.
The six states
| State | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Settled | Done. Sent, delivered, and acknowledged if an acknowledgement was expected | Nothing |
| Waiting | In flight. Expected to settle by itself | Nothing yet |
| Action | Something needs a person: a staged document to process, a decision to make | Open it |
| Overdue | An expected receipt has not come within the deadline | Chase it, or check the deadline is realistic |
| Failed | It did not work. The error is on the message | Fix the cause, then retry |
| Superseded | Replaced by a newer document of the same kind, such as a second confirmation | Nothing. Kept for the history |
Reading it on a support call
The sequence is usually enough by itself. An order with a confirmation and an invoice but no despatch advice tells you the packing slip was not posted, which is a warehouse question, not an EDI one. An invoice sitting at waiting past its deadline tells you the receipt has not come, which is a partner question. An invoice at failed tells you it never left, and the reason is one click away.
The thing worth internalising is that a document you cannot see on the tracker was never produced. That moves the question from EDI to whatever should have produced it.
What it does not show
Documents that have nothing to do with this order. A free text invoice to the same customer is on its own tracker, because it belongs to no order. If you are looking for everything to one partner rather than everything on one order, that is the message log.