BSN
Beginning segment for ship notice: shipment identification, date, time, and the hierarchical structure code.
EDI 856: 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. Supplier (shipper) to buyer (receiver). This page covers what the 856 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 856 Is For
The 856 tells the receiving dock what is coming before the truck does. It describes a shipment hierarchically, the shipment, the orders inside it, the pallets or cartons inside those, and the items inside those, along with the carrier, the bill of lading, the ship date, and the serialized container labels (SSCC) on each pack.
Retailers and manufacturers use the ASN to receive by scanning labels against the notice rather than counting by hand, which is why an 856 that does not match the physical shipment draws the heaviest compliance chargebacks in EDI. It follows the 850 and precedes the 810, and its quantities are what the buyer expects to invoice against.
The Segments You Meet First
In document order, the segments that carry the 856's meaning. A partner's implementation guide says which are required and which fields each must hold.
HL
Hierarchical level: one loop per shipment, order, pack, and item, nested by parent id.
TD1
Carrier details: packaging, lading quantity, and weight.
TD5
Carrier details: routing, carrier code, and mode.
REF
References such as the bill of lading and the buyer’s PO number at the order level.
MAN
Marks and numbers: the SSCC label on a pallet or carton.
LIN
Item identification at the item level.
SN1
Item detail for shipment: the quantity shipped for that item.
Where It Goes Wrong
The hierarchy. Shipment-order-pack-item versus shipment-order-item-pack is a trading-partner choice, and a supplier who builds the wrong structure for a given retailer gets every ASN rejected. After that, timing: an 856 that arrives after the truck defeats its purpose, and label data in the MAN segment that does not match the label on the carton is a chargeback.
The Documents It Travels With
The 856 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 850855 · Purchase Order Acknowledgment
The supplier’s answer to a purchase order: accepted, rejected, changed, or backordered, line by line.
See The 855810 · Invoice
The supplier’s bill for goods or services delivered against a purchase order.
See The 810945 · Warehouse Shipping Advice
A warehouse’s confirmation that an order shipped: what, when, by which carrier, with tracking.
See The 945997 · Functional Acknowledgment
The receipt that says an EDI transmission arrived and was parsed, with any syntax errors found.
See The 997How The 856 Moves On Files.com
A partner sends the 856 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 856 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 856 that was due never arrives. The full picture is on the EDI software page.
EDI 856 Questions
What teams ask about the 856 and how it moves on Files.com.
An EDI 856 is the X12 Ship Notice/Manifest, the advance ship notice or ASN. A supplier sends it to the buyer before a shipment arrives to describe its contents, packing hierarchy, carrier, and labels, so the receiver can plan and receive by scan.
Before the shipment arrives, and most retailers require it within a short window of the shipment leaving, often the same day, so it is in the receiving system ahead of the truck.
The 945 is the warehouse telling the owner of the goods what shipped. The 856 is the owner of the goods telling the buyer what is coming. The 945 often provides the data for the 856.
Yes. Files.com is a standards-compliant RFC 4130 AS2 endpoint, and a 856 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 856 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 856 from your system’s export and drops it in the partner’s outbox for delivery.
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