What is a Stedi Guide?

Stedi guides are a machine-readable format for EDI implementation guides.

This page explains why implementation guides are required for EDI integrations and how Stedi guides differ from traditional guide formats.

New to EDI? We recommend reviewing our EDI Essentials documentation. It explains why EDI is used in business transactions and the various components of an EDI document's structure.

EDI implementation guides

You and your partners must agree upon an EDI format for all of the business documents you plan to exchange. You define these EDI requirements in an implementation guide, also known as a companion guide, EDI reference guide, or just guide.

You create one implementation guide for every transaction set. For example, you need an implementation guide for a purchase order and a separate guide for an invoice. An implementation guide is similar to a schema definition, with a few peculiarities specific to EDI.

Base specification

All implementation guides are customized versions of a base specification. There is a base specification for each type of transaction set. For example, there is one for invoices, one for health care claims, and one for ship notices.

• X12 transaction sets
• EDIFACT transaction sets

Base specifications are designed to cover all possible use cases for the transaction set. For example, the base specification for ship notices contains fields for every type of ship notice you could ever encounter.

Validation

Implementation guides include information like expected fields, data types and sizes, and which fields are required. You can use these details to validate incoming and outgoing EDI documents.

Stedi guides vs. standard guides

Standard implementation guides are typically in a static format, like PDF, CSV, or even Word document files. In contrast, Stedi guides display EDI requirements as interactive web pages with built-in validation.