EDI, without the busywork.

HeddleGrid connects you to your retail trading partners over EDI and turns every incoming document into clean, structured data — and sends acknowledgments, ship notices and invoices back out automatically. No portals. No re-keying. No multi-week onboarding.

If you sell into major retailers, EDI is mandatory: your partners send you purchase orders and expect acknowledgments, advance ship notices and invoices in return, in exacting formats, on tight timelines. Traditionally that means a brittle integration, a per-partner setup project, and an inbox full of documents someone retypes by hand.

HeddleGrid replaces all of that. You connect a partner once, we map their format with AI in hours, and from then on orders arrive as clean data you can pull from an API, receive by webhook, or work in the dashboard — and everything you owe them flows back out on time.

Who HeddleGrid is for

• Apparel and consumer-goods vendors shipping to major and mass-market retailers.
• Operations teams drowning in manual order entry and chargeback surprises.
• Developers who want EDI to behave like a modern API, not a 1985 file format.

Core concepts

Five objects make up everything in HeddleGrid. Once these click, the rest of the product is obvious.

Quickstart

From zero to receiving live orders in four steps. Most partners are live within a few days — the gating factor is your partner's certification window, not HeddleGrid.

Receive your first order by webhook

# A purchase order arrived and was mapped to a canonical Order.
# HeddleGrid POSTs this to your endpoint:
{
  "event": "order.created",
  "created": "2026-06-03T11:42:09Z",
  "data": {
    "id": "ord_8Q2vXk",
    "partner": "prt_northstar",
    "poNumber": "0521-447832",
    "purpose": "original",
    "poDate": "2026-06-03",
    "lineCount": 2
  }
}

Trading partners

A trading partner represents one counterparty you exchange EDI with. Each carries the details that make its documents unique:

• Interchange identifiers — the sender/receiver IDs and qualifiers that route documents to and from the partner.
• Document profile — which document types this partner sends and expects (orders, acknowledgments, ship notices, invoices, inventory).
• Mappings — one approved mapping per document type, versioned over time as the partner updates their spec.
• Compliance rules — partner-specific requirements (timing windows, labeling, required fields) that HeddleGrid validates against before anything goes out.

Partners move through three states: draft (being configured), testing (running certification cycles), and live (in production). HeddleGrid keeps test and production traffic strictly separate so a certification run can never touch live orders.

Transport: AS2, SFTP & API

Transport is how documents physically move. HeddleGrid supports the three that matter, and you can mix them across partners.

Onboarding a partner

This is where HeddleGrid is different. Traditional EDI onboarding is a multi-week professional-services project to hand-build a map for one partner's format. HeddleGrid does it with AI, with you in control.

1. Upload the spec. Drop in the partner's EDI implementation guide (PDF) and any sample files. HeddleGrid reads every segment, qualifier, code list and loop.
2. AI drafts the mapping. HeddleGrid generates a complete mapping to the canonical model, plus validation rules, with fixtures derived from your real samples.
3. You review. Walk the proposed mapping field by field in a side-by-side view. Adjust anything; your corrections are remembered.
4. Approve & version. Approving locks a version. When the partner changes their spec later, you upload the new guide and review only the diff.
5. Test, then go live. Run certification cycles in testing; promote to live when your partner signs off.

Supported documents

HeddleGrid speaks the X12 documents that drive retail trade. Inbound documents become canonical objects; outbound objects become compliant EDI.

EDIFACT support (for partners outside North America) is on the roadmap; talk to us if you need it today.

Document lifecycle

Every document — in or out — moves through a predictable set of states you can watch in the dashboard or subscribe to via webhooks.

Inbound (e.g. a purchase order)

received ──▶ parsed ──▶ mapped ──▶ validated ──▶ delivered
                                  │
                                  └─▶ exception  # needs attention

Outbound (e.g. an invoice)

created ──▶ generated ──▶ sent ──▶ acknowledged
                              │
                              └─▶ rejected  # partner returned an error

A document is only acknowledged once the partner's functional acknowledgment (997) confirms acceptance. HeddleGrid tracks that round-trip for you and surfaces anything that doesn't come back.

Acknowledgments

EDI has two kinds of "ack," and HeddleGrid handles both so you never think about them:

• Functional acknowledgment (997) — the technical receipt confirming a document was received and structurally valid. HeddleGrid sends these automatically for inbound documents and reconciles the ones you receive for outbound documents.
• Business acknowledgment (855) — your commitment back to the partner on a purchase order: accepting, rejecting, or proposing changes to lines, quantities, prices and dates. You issue these from the dashboard or the API.

Validation & exceptions

Most retail penalties come from documents that are late or non-compliant, not missing. HeddleGrid validates every document against the partner's rules before it goes out, and flags inbound documents that don't fit the agreed format.

Validation runs at two levels:

• Structural — envelope integrity, control-number balance, required segments and qualifiers.
• Compliance — partner-specific business rules: required fields, value ranges, timing windows, and labeling expectations.

Anything that fails lands in the exception queue — a single worklist with a plain-language explanation of what's wrong and a guided fix. Resolve it there and the document continues on its way. Your ops team runs the daily EDI desk from this one screen, no engineer required.

Authentication

The HeddleGrid API uses bearer tokens. Create API keys in Settings → API keys. Keep secret keys server-side; never ship them in client code.

curl https://api.heddlegrid.com/v1/orders \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_••••••••"

Keys are scoped to an environment. sk_test_… keys see only testing partners and traffic; sk_live_… keys see production. The base URL is the same for both — the key decides the environment.

REST API

A small, predictable REST API over the canonical model. JSON in, JSON out; cursor pagination; idempotency keys on every write.

Documents & orders

Sending documents back

Example — send a ship notice

curl -X POST https://api.heddlegrid.com/v1/ship-notices \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_••••••••" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: ship_0521-447832_a1" \
  -d '{
    "orderId": "ord_8Q2vXk",
    "shipDate": "2026-07-08",
    "carrier": "your-carrier",
    "trackingNumber": "1Z...",
    "cartons": [
      { "sscc": "000123456000000001",
        "lines": [{ "lineNumber": 1, "quantityShipped": 144 }] }
    ]
  }'

HeddleGrid generates the compliant 856, assigns control numbers, sends it over the partner's connection, and tracks the acknowledgment — you just describe what shipped.

Webhooks

Subscribe to events to drive your own systems in real time. HeddleGrid signs every delivery; verify the signature with your endpoint's signing secret.

Deliveries retry with exponential backoff for 24 hours. Replay any event from the dashboard.

The Order object

One shape for a purchase order, identical across every partner. This is what you build against.

{
  "id": "ord_8Q2vXk",
  "partner": "prt_northstar",
  "poNumber": "0521-447832",
  "poType": "standard",
  "purpose": "original",          // original | change | cancel
  "poDate": "2026-06-03",
  "estimatedShipDate": "2026-07-08",
  "estimatedDeliveryDate": "2026-07-10",
  "shipTo": {
    "code": "3801", "name": "Regional DC",
    "city": "Springfield", "state": "TX",
    "postalCode": "75063", "country": "US"
  },
  "lines": [
    {
      "lineNumber": 1,
      "buyerItemNumber": "249-04-1180",
      "upc": "492403118007",
      "productDescription": "Crew Sock 3pk — Black",
      "quantityOrdered": 144,
      "measurementUnit": "EA",
      "unitPrice": "9.40"
    }
  ],
  "raw": { "documentId": "doc_b7..." }  // link to source EDI
}

The raw reference always lets you drop down to the exact source EDI — useful for audits and partner disputes. The same canonical pattern applies to Acknowledgment, ShipNotice, Invoice and InventoryAdvice.

Security & compliance

• Encryption everywhere. TLS in transit; AES-256 at rest. AS2 payloads are signed and encrypted end to end.
• Isolation. Every account's data is tenant-isolated at the data layer. Your documents are never visible to another customer.
• Key management. AS2 private keys and partner credentials are stored in a managed secrets vault and rotated automatically.
• Audit trail. Every document, mapping change and configuration edit is recorded immutably — who, what, when.
• Compliance. SOC 2 Type II program in progress; reach out for our current report and security questionnaire.

Reliability & SLA

EDI is order and financial data — HeddleGrid treats it that way. Inbound documents are durably stored the moment they arrive, processed with at-least-once guarantees, and de-duplicated by control number. Outbound documents retry automatically and surface to you if a partner is unreachable.

• 99.9% uptime on production plans, with a public status page.
• No silent loss. Anything that can't be delivered lands in the exception queue, never the void.
• Full replay. Re-deliver any document or webhook event on demand.

FAQ & support

How long does it take to add a new partner?

HeddleGrid produces the mapping in hours. The real timeline is set by your partner's certification process — usually days to a couple of weeks. We run the test cycles with you.

Do I need to understand X12 to use HeddleGrid?

No. You work with clean objects — orders, ship notices, invoices. The X12 lives underneath, available when you need to audit it.

Can I keep my current setup during a switch?

Yes. HeddleGrid can run in parallel with an existing EDI provider so you validate every document side by side before cutting over. Nothing flips until you're confident.

What if a partner uses a value-added network?

HeddleGrid interconnects to value-added networks on your behalf — you don't need your own. Direct AS2 is used wherever a partner supports it.

How do I get help?

Email support@heddlegrid.com or reach your dedicated onboarding contact. Enterprise plans include a shared channel and an SLA.