Odoo EDI integration

What Odoo does natively

Odoo uses the word EDI for electronic invoicing. Its documentation page "Electronic invoicing (EDI)" covers the formats per country and the Peppol network, where Odoo acts as access point and SMP itself; Peppol registration is free and available in Community. The modules in Odoo 19 follow that line: account_edi, account_edi_ubl_cii (E-FFF, UBL BIS 3, EHF3, NLCIUS, Factur-X, XRechnung), account_peppol, around forty country modules, and two for orders: sale_edi_ubl imports purchase orders in UBL BIS 3, purchase_edi_ubl_bis3 exports and imports them on the purchase side.

A search of the Odoo 19 documentation index on 3 October 2026 returns no page for X12, EDIFACT or SSCC. The list of countries eligible for Peppol registration in Odoo has 42 entries, all European; the United States is not on it. For a supplier to Walmart, Target or Home Depot the native part is therefore the records an integration writes to and reads from:

This page is the Odoo side of our EDI integration. How Odoo exposes data in general is on the Odoo system page.

What sits between Odoo and your trading partner

The mapping of the 850 uses PO 4500018236 from our document pages: 24 units of item 10482 and 16 of item 10499 for Harbor Retail DC 07.

The order is written over the JSON-2 API in two calls, create and then action_confirm, after the lookups for customer, delivery contact and products:

POST /json/2/sale.order/create HTTP/1.1
Authorization: bearer 7c1d...a940
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8

{"vals_list": [{"partner_id": 4711, "partner_shipping_id": 4718,
  "client_order_ref": "4500018236", "commitment_date": "2026-10-06 04:00:00",
  "order_line": [[0, 0, {"product_id": 881, "product_uom_qty": 24, "price_unit": 12.50}],
                 [0, 0, {"product_id": 894, "product_uom_qty": 16, "price_unit": 8.75}]]}]}

commitment_date is a datetime that Odoo stores in UTC. Midnight on 6 October in Columbus, Ohio, during daylight saving time is 04:00 UTC; sent as 00:00:00 it lands on the evening of the 5th in the warehouse's view.

The technical reality of this pair

The Custom plan. Odoo states that data access through the external API is only available on Custom plans. Without it there is no route for an outside integration.

Keys that expire. Since Odoo 19 an API key for a normal internal user expires after at most 90 days. The integration renews its own key with res.users.apikeys/generate before the expiry date; a key that lapses stops every 850 at once.

Two transactions per order. Every JSON-2 call runs in its own database transaction, and calls cannot be chained. When create succeeds and action_confirm fails, a quotation with the PO number stays behind. Odoo does mark a draft order whose customer and client_order_ref match another order in duplicated_order_ids, but it does not block it, and the check covers only drafts. The integration looks up client_order_ref for that customer before every retry and confirms the existing quotation instead of creating a second one.

A morning file. One 850 takes about four calls: customer and delivery contact, products, create, action_confirm. A retailer that sends 400 purchase orders at 06:00 causes 1,600 calls. Odoo documents no request limit per minute, so the pace depends on the hosting and the installed apps. The integration measures it on your database, queues the orders and returns the 997 when the file has been read, not when the last order is confirmed.

What Odoo and X12 store differently

The SSCC. A package type can have its own sequence, but a sequence counts up with a prefix and padding; it does not compute the GS1 check digit. An SSCC built from the GS1 company prefix needs that digit, and Amazon, for example, rejects a number reused within 365 days. The SSCC label page explains the structure.

The invoice policy. With the default policy an invoice bills the ordered quantities. For PO 4500018236 that is 24 × 12.50 plus 16 × 8.75, 440.00, against 405.00 for the 24 and 12 units that shipped. With the 2% discount and 18.50 freight the 810 would say 449.70 instead of 415.40, and a retailer that matches the invoice against the ship notice rejects it or deducts the difference.

Units and barcodes. A retailer that orders 2 CA means 24 units. In Odoo 19 a case is a unit with relative_factor 12 against Units, and its GTIN-14 sits in product.uom, where Odoo enforces that one barcode belongs to one product and unit. The units of measure note covers the general case.

When it goes wrong

We build the integration to your Odoo database and your trading partners, host it and run it, for a fixed build price and a monthly fee. A new partner starts as a dry run that writes nothing to Odoo and sends nothing, and you approve the first documents. When a partner publishes a new guide or Odoo renames a field in an upgrade, we change the integration. The same work on other ERPs is under NetSuite EDI integration and Acumatica EDI integration. Tell us your Odoo version and partners.