How to exchange documents in the PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL Solution

PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL is an online EDI-solution that allows you to easily exchange business documents with a selected group of Dutch retail companies according to the GS1 specifications: ORDERS, APERAK, DESADV and INVOIC. 

In the PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL, you use “My Documents” service. “My Documents” service is a manual application where you can exchange the required EDI-documents with your retail customers.

Ideally, the sequence of the work in this environment is as that: you receive an order from your retail customer --> APARAK document will be sent automatically from that order response to your retail customer who sent the order --> you manually create DESADV document from the order response (this step is shown if this is required as a business process with the retailers) --> you manually create an invoice from that DESADV.

To do that using “My Documents” service in the PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL, you can follow the following steps:

1. Follow the instruction sent to you by emails to login to the PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL environment.
2. Click on “My Documents” tab

Before explaining the next step, here is some explanation of some important functionalities in “My Documents” that you will need to exchange documents:

In “My Document” landing page, you can see the list of your documents that you exchange with your retail customers. The most important functionalities are determined in this screenshot:

There you can see several functionalities. You get here a brief description of the most important functionalities:

1. “Create New Document” button:- you cannot here create a new document in the PORTAL-2-FLOW Retail Edition NL. You will get an error if you click on that button because of the sequence of exchanging documents which explained above
2. “Filter” documents: you can filter your documents there as per shown in this screenshot:
3. “Search” for a specific document
4. “Export Document List
5. “Schedule Reports.
6. “Settings” button: there you can set your preferences.
7. “Show document info” button: to show you a quick information of the selected document
8. “Documents Table”: here you can see the list of your documents and selected details (you can change what to show by setting your preferences)
9. “Business Process”: that shows the required steps of the business process. You can see there that for this retail customer, the business process consists of two steps: orders and invoices
10. “Document Type”: that show which document type is in the list.
11. “Status” bar: shows status of the document
12. “More actions” button is the most important button that you will need to exchange documents

3.  After you receive an order from your retail customer, you need to click on “More actions” button:

As you can see in the above screenshot, this button has more functionalities there, you can create the following document type (according to the business process), show the selected document, refresh the metadata, and create prepayment invoice (if you prefer to do so).

4. To create an invoice from that order that needs to be sent to your retail customer, click on “Create Invoice (Required)”button --> confirm that by clicking on “Yes” button --> you got a success message that the document is being created. Wait few seconds until the invoice manual form is shown à go between the tabs in the invoice and fill manually the required information of your invoice there (see screenshot)

A red exclamation mark next to the field definition indicates that this is a required input needs to be filled with the required information. See screenshot:

In case you need to add new line to that invoice, you can do that by clicking on “New Line” and fill in the necessary information of that line.

In case you want to change or delete a specific line, click on “More Actions” button in the right of that line. (see screenshot)

5. You filled in all necessary and required data?? You can then do different actions to that invoice as desired. You want to send this invoice directly to your retail customer, click then on “Send Document” and confirm sending by clicking “Yes” button.

6. Wait until the document is fully sent, you can then view the status of that document in the “Status” bar.

Note that when the business process end for a specific document, the business process visuals will show that the business process is complete (see screenshot)

These steps you do for all manual documents’ types required by the business process of that retail customer.