EDI 850 Purchase-Order Translator

The problem this kills

EDI 850 purchase orders are supposed to make ordering automatic. In practice, a raw 850 looks like a wall of cryptic segments - ST, BEG, PO1, N1, mystery qualifiers, and unit-of-measure codes that mean nothing to a human. So your team does the one thing EDI was meant to prevent: they squint at the file, decode it by hand, look up the partner's part numbers, and re-key the whole order into your ERP. Every manual step is a chance for a transposed quantity, a wrong SKU, or a duplicate PO that ships twice.

When a partner uses their part numbers and you use yours, the mapping lives in someone's head or a stale spreadsheet. When a new buyer or store location appears on the 850, the order stalls. And when the same PO arrives twice (EDI re-sends happen), nothing stops it from becoming two orders.

This tool turns the raw 850 into a plain-English order, maps the partner's part numbers to your SKUs automatically, flags anything it can't map, and refuses to create an order until a human has looked at it and clicked approve.

What you'll build

A small, private web app where your EDI coordinators and order-entry team log in and:

• Upload an EDI 850 file (or a flat-file / CSV export if you can't get the raw EDI yet).
• See it translated into a clean, human-readable order: buyer, ship-to, PO number, PO date, requested dates, line items, quantities, units of measure, and prices - with the cryptic qualifiers and UOM codes decoded into words.
• Get partner part numbers mapped to your SKUs automatically from a mapping table you control, with unmapped lines clearly flagged so nothing slips through.
• Review and approve each order. The AI drafts; a coordinator decides. Only on approval does it become a committed order.
• Export an ERP-ready CSV in the exact columns your system expects, so the order drops straight into your system of record.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A guided, copy-paste build: each step ends with a prompt you paste into your AI coding agent. You don't write code - you direct it.
• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before a single line is built, the plan makes the agent ask about your trading partners, the real shape of your 850s, your part-number and SKU conventions, your unit-of-measure codes, your approval rules, and your messiest edge cases - then it tailors the data model and validations to your answers instead of forcing you into a generic template.
• A clean order-review screen built for non-technical reviewers, not an EDI engineer.
• A partner-and-SKU mapping table you can edit, plus clear flagging of any line that doesn't map.
• Handling for EDI qualifiers and unit-of-measure codes, translated into plain language.
• The "No API yet?" fallback baked in: flat-file / CSV in, clean CSV out, so you can ship it this weekend even with zero integration to your ERP.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can use the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own orders and mappings.
• A complete audit trail - who uploaded, who edited a mapping, who approved, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the translated order is a draft until a coordinator approves it. Nothing becomes an order or an export until a person signs off.
• Duplicate guards keyed on partner + PO number, so the same 850 can't quietly become two orders.

Who it's for

EDI coordinators, order-entry staff, and customer-service reps who receive purchase orders by EDI and are tired of decoding raw 850s and re-keying them - especially anyone who handles multiple trading partners with different part-number schemes.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the interview tailor the tool to your business.