Connect Email PDF documents to EDI instantly
Join thousands of businesses moving EDI orders, invoices and fulfilment updates between Email PDF documents and their trading partners on XEDI, no manual re-keying.
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Getting started with Email PDF documents EDI
XEDI can produce trading documents as PDFs for partners who want something a person reads, and can take data out of PDFs arriving from partners who send nothing else, with honest limits on the second of those.
One managed platform, no custom code
XEDI maps Email PDF documents to your trading partners and validates every document, so data flows straight into the systems your teams already use.
Producing a PDF is easy; reading one is not
These two directions get grouped together and they are not alike. Producing a document is straightforward: you hold the data, you lay it out, you send it, and it looks the same every time.
Reading one is genuinely hard. A PDF carries no structure worth the name, layouts differ between senders and change without notice, and a number in the wrong place is indistinguishable from the right one to anything reading it mechanically. Anybody promising reliable extraction from arbitrary supplier documents is overselling.
Which is why extraction is treated as provisional
Where a partner's layout is stable, extraction works well and saves real effort. Where it is not, the sensible behaviour is to say so rather than guess, because a confidently wrong quantity is worse than an obvious gap.
So anything extracted carries a confidence position, and anything below the agreed threshold is raised for a person rather than passed on. The measure of success is how much genuinely does not need looking at, not whether every document was processed.
What your team sees day to day
You get an EDI mailbox and a portal that behaves like an inbox, holding both the structured documents and the PDFs, so a partner's attachment is not sitting in an individual's mail.
Outbound, the order becomes the despatch advice with SSCC pallet labels where required, and the invoice follows delivery with its arrival confirmed in the dashboard; a readable PDF accompanies it where a partner wants one.
Inbound, what could be extracted becomes data and what could not is flagged. Over time, the partners worth moving onto a proper connection become obvious from the exception list. Nothing internal has to change; the EDI capability is added around documents you already produce and receive.
Documents you can exchange
- Orders and despatch notes issued as readable PDFs
- Invoices as PDFs alongside the structured document
- Purchase orders received as PDFs and turned into data
- Delivery notes and remittances extracted where the layout is stable
- Exception reports where extraction was not confident
Built for Email PDF documents teams
Whoever owns Email PDF documents in your business, XEDI keeps EDI accurate and hands-off.
- Businesses trading with less automated partners
- Finance teams receiving supplier invoices as PDFs
- Operations receiving orders by email
- Suppliers whose customers want a human-readable note
- Anyone re-keying documents from attachments
Email PDF documents EDI document types
Direction matters more than usual here, because the two directions behave very differently.
| Document | What it carries | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Outbound invoices | A readable PDF issued alongside the structured invoice for partners who want both. | You to partner |
| Outbound despatch notes | A document that can travel with goods or reach someone who will not read a data file. | You to partner |
| Inbound purchase orders | Orders arriving only as PDFs, extracted into data where the layout allows. | Partner to you |
| Inbound invoices | Supplier invoices extracted for matching, with anything uncertain raised rather than assumed. | Supplier to you |
| Remittance documents | Payment detail arriving as a PDF, extracted to support allocation. | Partner to you |
| Extraction exceptions | Documents where confidence was too low to proceed, listed for a person. | XEDI to you |
How to connect Email PDF documents with EDI using XEDI
The two directions are scoped separately because they carry very different risk. The sequence below is what onboarding looks like from your side.
-
01
We separate the two directions, because producing a PDF and reading one are not comparable problems.
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02
For outbound, we agree the layout and what each partner expects to see on it.
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03
For inbound, we assess the documents you actually receive and how consistent they are.
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04
We prove both flows, including what happens when extraction is not confident enough to proceed.
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05
You get readable documents where they are wanted, and structured data where a PDF is all a partner will send.
Ready to connect Email PDF documents?
Talk through documents, mapping, testing and go-live with XEDI.
Everything about Email PDF documents EDI
Common requirements
- Which partners want or send PDFs
- Sample documents in the real formats
- Outbound layout expectations
- What confidence threshold is acceptable inbound
- The trading relationships involved
What we need from you to build it
Only what we cannot decide for you. Partner requirements are ours; the confidence threshold is a decision you own.
- Which partners are involved
- Who wants a PDF from you and who sends you nothing else, since those are separate pieces of work.
- Real sample documents
- Actual examples rather than templates, because what partners really send is rarely what their template suggests.
- Outbound layout
- What each partner expects to see on a readable document, and whether it must match anything they already receive.
- Acceptable confidence
- How certain extraction must be before it proceeds without a person, which is a commercial decision rather than a technical one.
- The trading relationships involved
- Which partners this covers. What each of them requires is already held by us.
Why suppliers choose XEDI for Email PDF documents
- Most partners are connected already, and those that are not are the ones sending PDFs in the first place.
- We are straightforward that PDF extraction is provisional, rather than promising accuracy nobody can deliver.
- Low-confidence extractions are raised for a person instead of being passed on as fact.
- Readable documents are produced alongside structured ones where a partner wants both.
- Attachments live in the platform rather than in an individual's mailbox.
- The exception list makes it obvious which partners are worth moving to a proper connection.
Can you read our suppliers' PDF invoices?
Often, where the layout is reasonably stable. Where it is not, extraction is treated as provisional and anything uncertain is raised for a person, because a confidently wrong figure is worse than an obvious gap.
Can you send our customers a PDF invoice as well as an EDI one?
Yes, and that is the easier direction. The readable document is produced from the same data as the structured one, so they cannot disagree.
Is this as good as a proper EDI connection?
No, and we would not claim it is. It is a way of dealing with partners who will not offer anything better, and the exception list usually makes the case for moving the worst of them onto a real connection.
Plan your Email PDF documents EDI setup
Everything you need to scope, map and go live with Email PDF documents, in one place.