BIA
Beginning segment for inventory inquiry/advice: report type, reference number, and date.
EDI 846: Inventory Inquiry / Advice
A supplier’s report of stock levels: on hand, available, committed, and on order. Supplier to buyer, or warehouse to owner; also used as an inquiry from buyer to supplier. This page covers what the 846 is for, the segments you meet when you open one, the documents it travels with, where it tends to go wrong, and how it moves over AS2 into your systems on Files.com, which receives, parses, validates, and routes it as configuration.
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What The 846 Is For
The 846 tells a trading partner how much of an item there is. Suppliers send it to retailers and marketplaces so listings reflect what can actually ship; warehouses send it to the companies whose goods they hold; drop-ship programs run on it, because the retailer sells against the supplier’s inventory rather than its own.
It is a report, not an order, and it is usually scheduled: a full feed daily and deltas more often. Each item appears with one or more quantity types, on hand, available to promise, committed, on order, and dates for when more arrives. The retailer’s side turns those numbers into what a shopper sees as in stock.
The Segments You Meet First
In document order, the segments that carry the 846's meaning. A partner's implementation guide says which are required and which fields each must hold.
LIN
Item identification: the product identifiers (UPC, SKU, vendor item number).
PID
Item description.
QTY
A quantity with a qualifier: on hand, available, committed, on order, backordered.
DTM
A date tied to a quantity, such as when an on-order quantity is expected.
N1
The location or party the inventory belongs to, when the report covers several.
Where It Goes Wrong
Stale 846s oversell. A retailer that trusts yesterday’s available quantity takes orders the supplier cannot fill, and the failures show up as cancelled 850s and customer complaints. The other failure is quantity-type confusion: reporting on-hand where the partner expects available-to-promise makes committed stock look sellable.
The Documents It Travels With
The 846 rarely moves alone. These are the documents that precede, answer, or settle it.
850 · Purchase Order
A buyer’s order to a supplier: the items, quantities, prices, dates, and ship-to locations.
See The 850852 · Product Activity Data
A retailer’s report of sales and inventory movement by product and location, sent back to the supplier.
See The 852856 · Ship Notice / Manifest (ASN)
The advance ship notice: what is in the shipment, how it is packed, and how it is labeled, sent before it arrives.
See The 856997 · Functional Acknowledgment
The receipt that says an EDI transmission arrived and was parsed, with any syntax errors found.
See The 997How The 846 Moves On Files.com
A partner sends the 846 over AS2, SFTP, or FTPS, and it lands in that partner’s inbox folder on Files.com with the transport receipt recorded. From there it is a workflow, not a project: TransformScript parses the X12 natively into the JSON, CSV, or XML your ERP or WMS reads, content validation flags a document whose contents are wrong before anything ingests it, and an automation routes the result to the system and the people who act on it.
Outbound is the mirror image. Your system exports its record, TransformScript builds the 846 the partner’s guide specifies, and the file dropped in the partner’s outbox goes out over AS2 with automatic retries until the MDN confirms delivery. Every transmission in both directions is in the audit log, and delivery monitoring alerts when a 846 that was due never arrives. The full picture is on the EDI software page.
EDI 846 Questions
What teams ask about the 846 and how it moves on Files.com.
An EDI 846 is the X12 Inventory Inquiry/Advice. A supplier or warehouse sends it to report stock levels for each item, with quantity types such as on hand, available, and on order, so the trading partner can sell or plan against real inventory.
On the schedule the trading partners agree. Marketplaces and drop-ship retailers commonly require a full inventory feed daily and incremental updates several times a day.
The 846 reports inventory position. The 852 Product Activity Data reports movement, typically sales and on-hand by store, from the retailer back to the supplier.
Yes. Files.com is a standards-compliant RFC 4130 AS2 endpoint, and a 846 sent by a trading partner lands in that partner’s inbox folder with a signed MDN receipt returned to the sender. Partners who exchange over SFTP or FTPS connect to the same platform and the document lands in the same place.
Yes. TransformScript parses the X12 846 natively and writes the JSON, CSV, or XML your systems ingest, as a step in the workflow that fires when the document arrives. Outbound, the same engine builds a 846 from your system’s export and drops it in the partner’s outbox for delivery.
Exchange The 846 Without The Legacy Stack
Start the 7-day trial, turn AS2 on, and exchange certificates with your partner. The 846 lands in their folder, parses into the record your system reads, and every transmission carries a signed receipt.
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