James Allman | JA Technology Solutions LLC
EDI 852 Product Activity Builder
Report sell-through and on-hand quantities per item, with an optional per-store SDQ breakdown, and download a valid X12 852 ready to send.
EDI 852 Product Activity Builder
Build a syntactically valid X12 EDI 852 product activity report directly in your browser. Set the reporting date range, pick the activity codes to report (quantity sold, on hand, on order, committed, received, transferred), and enter quantities per item by UPC. Turn on the store breakdown to enter per-store quantities; the tool sums the ZA totals and emits SDQ segments with up to 10 store/quantity pairs each. Save trading-partner profiles (ISA sender/receiver IDs, qualifiers, GS codes) locally, shared with the other EDI builders. Preview the generated X12 document live and download a ready-to-send .edi file. Runs entirely in your browser.
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What an 852 Product Activity Report Is
The X12 852 is how a retailer tells its suppliers what actually happened at the shelf: units sold, units on hand, units on order, by item, for a reporting period. It flows in the opposite direction of most retail EDI. Instead of the supplier telling the buyer what shipped, the buyer shares its own movement data outward. Grocery and mass-market retailers typically send 852s weekly, one file per supplier, covering every item that supplier provides.
Why Suppliers Want It
Sell-through data drives the supplier side of the relationship: demand forecasting that reacts to real store movement instead of warehouse withdrawals, vendor-managed inventory and replenishment programs that need on-hand counts to decide what to ship, and category scorecards that track velocity by store. A supplier with clean 852 data spots a stalled item or a stockout pattern weeks before the order stream would reveal it.
The ZA and SDQ Structure in Plain Words
Inside the envelope, an XQ segment sets the reporting period. Each item then gets a LIN segment identifying it by UPC, followed by one ZA segment per activity being reported: ZA*QS*96*EA means 96 units sold. Common codes are QS (sold), QA (on hand), QO (on order), QC (committed), QR (received), and QT (transferred). When the retailer reports store-level detail, each ZA is followed by SDQ segments that split the total into store/quantity pairs, up to 10 pairs per SDQ. This tool manages all of that: pick the codes, enter quantities (per item, or per store with auto-summed totals), and the segments come out in the right order with a correct SE count.
Production 852 Feeds
This builder covers testing, samples, and one-off reports. In production, 852s are generated from POS or merchandising data on a schedule, and that is integration work I do: extracting movement by vendor, mapping item cross-references, emitting validator-clean files per partner, and loading inbound 852s into a supplier's forecasting tables. The generated file parses cleanly through the EDI File Parser, and the companion 850 PO Builder and 810 Invoice Builder share the same trading-partner store. For the bigger picture, see EDI integration services and grocery merchandising work. Questions about a partner's 852 spec? Ask James.
All tools run entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your machine.