EDI that fits in your pocket

EDI orders and documents in DataShift now work properly on a phone. We rebuilt both detail pages for small screens, so you can check an order, read a purchase order or chase a shipment from the warehouse floor without reaching for a laptop.

Most EDI work starts with a quick question. Has the buyer's PO arrived? Did our acknowledgement go out? What did the supplier change? Those questions often come up away from a desk, and until now the answers were hard to get to on a phone.

What was getting in the way

We went through the order and document pages on a phone, screen by screen, and wrote down every place a user would get stuck. Sixteen issues came out of it. These were the ones that hurt most:

• Too little room. On every record, a header, an action bar, a row of section tabs and the bottom nav were all fixed in place. Together they took about 216 px of an 844 px screen, before the browser's own toolbars.

• Raw data first. A document opened on its JSON payload. The readable version (buyer, ship-to, dates, lines) was hidden behind a "full view" overlay, below a timeline.

• Hard-to-read titles. Documents could be titled with a truncated ID, and partners appeared as system slugs rather than names.

• Missing views. On a phone there was no way to reach an order's packages or its related documents.

• Two scrollbars. Part of the order page scrolled inside the page, so a swipe often moved the wrong thing.

The redesign fixes all five, and most of the smaller issues with them.

Documents you can read like paper

Every EDI document now opens on what it says, not how it's stored. The header gives the document type, its own number, its status, who it's from, and when it arrived. A link takes you back to the order it belongs to.

Below that, three tabs split the document into the three things people look for:

• Document shows the purchase order, acknowledgement, shipment notice or invoice as a readable page: buyer and supplier, dates, ship-to and bill-to, lines and total.

• Activity is the processing timeline, oldest event first, with how long each step took. "Received to dispatched in 10 s" sits at the top.

• Payload keeps the raw standardised, original and output data for anyone who needs it, with metadata, processing and logs underneath.

The tab you're on is saved in the page address. Reloading, sharing a link or pressing back all behave as you'd expect.

A small strip above the tabs shows where the order is: PO, acknowledgement, shipment, invoice. You can tell at a glance whether this document is the latest step or there's more to come.

Orders at a glance

An order now opens on the three numbers people check first: the total, the number of lines, and the deliver-by date. Under them are four tabs: Overview, Lines, Packages and Docs. All four work on a phone.

The Overview tab shows the order's progress through four stages: purchase order, acknowledgement, shipment and invoice. Each stage has the date and time it happened and a link to its document. The next stage is marked as waiting.

When the supplier's acknowledgement changes something, the Overview says so. A short card lists the header fields that differ from the PO, such as a moved delivery date, with the old and new values side by side. One tap opens the full comparison.

The order page and every document page now use the same four stages. Before, they used two different models and could disagree about where an order was.

The whole page scrolls as one, with the tabs pinned under the header. The button bar at the bottom only appears when there's something to do, such as exceptions to review.

Small fixes that matter

Some of the most useful changes are small, and they reach the desktop too.

• Dates you can't misread. The timeline used to write 5 October as 10/05/2026, which reads as 10 May in Australia. Dates now spell out the month: 5 Oct 2026, 17:29.

• Status in words. Timeline events say "Dispatched" and "Standardised" instead of system codes in capitals. Order and document statuses use the same badges.

• Safer buttons. The big button at the bottom does the safe, useful thing, such as opening the order or retrying a failed document. Resend sits in the Actions menu, which explains that the partner may receive a duplicate.

• Easier tapping. Buttons and links are at least 44 px tall, and text no longer drops below 12 px.

• Errors that move out of the way. On a phone, an error summary scrolls with the page instead of staying pinned over a third of the screen.

Available now

The new mobile order and document pages are live for every DataShift EDI customer from the 6th of October 2026. There's nothing to switch on. Open any order or document on your phone and you'll see the new layout. On a laptop or desktop, everything works as before.

Next, we're bringing the same treatment to the orders and documents lists and the exceptions queue. If something on your phone still gets in the way, tell us at support@datashift.com.au. Most of this redesign started with a note like that.

Open an order on your phone today and see the difference.