Overview
An 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgement (POA) is a supplier's response to a purchase order. It confirms receipt, and indicates whether items are accepted, changed, or unavailable. It can also communicate updates such as quantity, price, or delivery date changes.
Creating and Sending an 855
Open your SPS Commerce Fulfillment portal and navigate to the relevant purchase order.
In the workflow, click New under the Acknowledgement section.
Complete all required fields (marked with a red asterisk).
Use Quick Send only if Auto Sourcing is configured to populate all mandatory fields. Otherwise, complete the form manually.
Send the acknowledgement. Orders will move out of the Ready for Acknowledgement tile once the 855 is sent.
Acknowledgement Types
Acknowledge – With Detail No Change: use when accepting all items as ordered. Item status must be set to Item Accepted (not a status that implies a change).
Acknowledge – With Detail and Change: use when quantities, dates, or other details differ from the PO. Update the relevant line item details.
Handling Out-of-Stock and Rejected Items
For out-of-stock items: use Acknowledge – With Detail and Change. Set the line status to Rejected and provide a reason if required (e.g., “out of stock”). Update the quantity to what you can fulfil (including zero if none can ship).
For temporarily backordered items: mark as backordered in the acknowledgement if your retailer allows it. When the items are available, create a new acknowledgement and shipment.
Sending a 855 will not remove line items from related documents like the ASN. Only a PO Change sent by the retailer that deletes the line items will remove them from the ASN.
Defaulting Line Item Acknowledgement
To select one line item acknowledgment status you want applied to all line items, check the ‘Defaulting Line Item Acknowledgement’ box in the Detail tab and in the Item Status dropdown select which status you want applied to all line items.
Common Errors and Resolutions
(1) MSG Segment Error
Cause: a newline character has been inserted within the MSG segment text.
Resolution: remove the newline character so the MSG content is a single continuous line, then resubmit.
(2) BuyerPartNumber Mismatch
Ensure all items and identifiers on the 855 exactly match the PO. If the PO was revised, resend the 855 reflecting the updated details.
(3) Missing Line Item Acknowledgements
If you receive an error stating lineItemAcknowledgement has 0 repetitions: resend the 855 with acknowledgement status (accepted, changed, or rejected) for each line item.
With Detail vs No Detail: If at the Header you select an option that includes ‘No Detail’, no data should be transmitted via the Detail tab. If you select an option that includes ‘With Detail’, data should be transmitted via the Detail tab.
More Information
Check out the Fulfillment Collection to see all Fulfillment articles.
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