W05
Shipping order identification: order status, depositor order number, and the customer’s PO number.
EDI 940: Warehouse Shipping Order
A shipper’s instruction to a warehouse or 3PL to ship goods to a customer. Shipper (the owner of the goods) to the warehouse or third-party logistics provider. This page covers what the 940 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 940 Is For
The 940 is how a company that stores inventory at a third-party warehouse tells that warehouse to ship it. It carries the shipping order number, the customer and ship-to location, the carrier and service level, the requested ship and delivery dates, and each item and quantity to pick.
It is the outbound half of the 3PL pair. The warehouse confirms what actually shipped with a 945, and the shipper uses that confirmation to send the customer’s 856 ship notice and 810 invoice. When the 940 is generated from a customer’s 850, the PO number rides along so every document in the chain can be traced back to the order.
The Segments You Meet First
In document order, the segments that carry the 940's meaning. A partner's implementation guide says which are required and which fields each must hold.
N1
Parties: the ship-to, the depositor, and sometimes the bill-to.
G62
Requested ship or delivery date.
W66
Warehouse carrier information: carrier, service level, and payment terms.
W01
A line item to ship: quantity, unit, and product identifiers.
W76
Total shipping order: the number of units and, where used, weight and volume.
Where It Goes Wrong
Item identifiers that differ between the shipper’s system and the warehouse management system are the usual break, followed by carrier and service codes the warehouse does not recognize. A 940 that arrives after the cutoff for the requested ship date creates a late shipment nobody flagged until the 945 came back with a different date.
The Documents It Travels With
The 940 rarely moves alone. These are the documents that precede, answer, or settle it.
945 · Warehouse Shipping Advice
A warehouse’s confirmation that an order shipped: what, when, by which carrier, with tracking.
See The 945943 · Warehouse Stock Transfer Shipment Advice
A shipper’s notice to a warehouse that inbound inventory is on its way to be received.
See The 943944 · Warehouse Stock Transfer Receipt Advice
A warehouse’s confirmation of inventory received: what arrived, in what quantity and condition.
See The 944856 · 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 856850 · Purchase Order
A buyer’s order to a supplier: the items, quantities, prices, dates, and ship-to locations.
See The 850How The 940 Moves On Files.com
A partner sends the 940 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 940 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 940 that was due never arrives. The full picture is on the EDI software page.
EDI 940 Questions
What teams ask about the 940 and how it moves on Files.com.
An EDI 940 is the X12 Warehouse Shipping Order. A company that keeps inventory at a third-party warehouse sends it to instruct the warehouse to pick and ship specific items to a specific customer, with the carrier and dates to use.
The 940 is the instruction to ship; the 945 Warehouse Shipping Advice is the warehouse’s confirmation of what shipped, when, and how, including the carrier and tracking details.
The 940 orders an outbound shipment to a customer. The 943 Warehouse Stock Transfer Shipment Advice tells the warehouse that inbound inventory is on its way to be received.
Yes. Files.com is a standards-compliant RFC 4130 AS2 endpoint, and a 940 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 940 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 940 from your system’s export and drops it in the partner’s outbox for delivery.
Exchange The 940 Without The Legacy Stack
Start the 7-day trial, turn AS2 on, and exchange certificates with your partner. The 940 lands in their folder, parses into the record your system reads, and every transmission carries a signed receipt.
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