What Is Electronic Data Interchange

The cost of poor communication in office settings is costing businesses more than you can imagine. Recent surveys have shown that $37 billion across America are lost as a result of ineffective communication in the workplace. One thing’s for sure: communication is one of the most essential things within the office.

Electronic data interchange technologies are the best way to ensure that business communications are sped up and accurate. But exactly what is electronic data interchange?

Here, we’re going to talk about what this technology is and how it can be applied to your business. Read on if you want to save money while growing your organization.

What Is Electronic Data Interchange?

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is simply a term referring to companies sharing business documents like invoices and purchase orders via digital instruments. Businesses or branches that conduct businesses electronically are commonly referred to as ‘trading partners.’

EDI technology eliminates the need for the manual sharing of documents, which ultimately leads to more efficient business practices.

What Are These Programs Good For?

EDI technologies are good for pretty much any business that communicates with clients or partners on a regular basis. Electronically shared data is quicker in getting to the endpoint, which eliminates the need for wait periods that inhibit business from being conducted quickly.

Using EDI also ensures that documents won’t get lost over time. After they’re transmitted to the endpoint, these documents will be saved within the software. This means that important communications will all be in one place. They won’t be scattered in desk drawers and disorganized file folders where you forget about them.

How Does EDI Benefit Business?

There are a few key ways that EDI technologies can benefit any business.

First, it decreases the likelihood of error when sending data. If a person were to manually enter and send important company data by hand, it’s only natural that human error would take its course sometimes.

All EDI-transmitted documents must be in a standard format that the transmitting software can read. As a result, EDI can save your business a lot of time and money. It eliminates the likelihood of people entering data in an unreadable format as well as the chances of people confusing themselves and entering data incorrectly.

If mistakes are made during the data entry and exchange process, people will need to go back and correct them. This means that time that could otherwise be used for sales or marketing will be wasted.

Not only that but if these errors are not caught, people may use the wrong data when performing tasks around the workplace. This will lead to inaccurate numbers and records that could prove detrimental to calculating income, organizing invoices, and more.

Start Conducting Efficient Business

So, what is electronic data interchange?

On a basic level, it’s simply a way of streamlining the entry of data and sharing of business documents. On a more complex level, it’s a technology that saves you a lot of time, money, and error.

Now that you know why EDI technologies are necessary for conducting business efficiently, it’s time to get started with more tips on doing this. Check out the ‘technology’ tab on our home page to get some more insight into the technologies that can help your startup grow.