EDI 811 Consolidated Service Invoice/Statement

The EDI 811 is the invoice for services that do not fit on a product invoice. A phone bill for 400 lines across 60 locations has no item numbers or ship quantities. It has accounts, sub-accounts, monthly recurring charges, usage, taxes and a running balance. The 811 was built for that shape, and it is the format large telecom carriers use when a business customer asks for its bill electronically.

This guide covers what the 811 carries, how its billing hierarchy works, every segment you will map, a live single-account example, how consolidated billing works, how the 811 differs from the 810, and the errors that cause short-pays and disputes.

What Is an EDI 811?

An EDI 811 is the Consolidated Service Invoice/Statement transaction set defined by ASC X12, used to bill or report complex, structured service invoice detail. The X12 standard describes it as suited to "either consolidated or standalone invoices for service arrangements which require processing other than that done for the typical product invoice." It travels in functional group CI (the GS01 value), and it can carry both payable items and information-only memo items.

Authoritative references for 811 work:

• The X12 811 structure (release 004010) on Stedi lists every segment and loop in order, including the HL hierarchy and the summary BAL loop
• The telecom industry's 811 conventions are maintained through ATIS, whose Ordering and Billing Forum (OBF) and TCIF guidelines define the billing levels and summing rules carriers follow. The US Department of Defense WAWF 811 telecom guide points vendors to ATIS for those rules
• Carriers publish their own implementation guides. Verizon posts an EDI 811 implementation guide and appendix, and Granite Telecommunications' 811 guide shows full sample bills

Who sends it? The service provider: in practice usually a telecom carrier, or an insurer or service bureau in some insurance programs.

Who receives it? The customer's accounts payable or telecom expense management system, or a federal agency's payment system.

When is it sent? Once per billing cycle, per billing account. A consolidated account produces one master 811 and, depending on the carrier, memo 811s for each sub-account.

Why does it matter? Service bills are large and change every month. If the 811 is mapped badly, AP pays the wrong total, taxes land in the wrong cost center, and nobody can trace a disputed charge back to the line or circuit that caused it.

Who Uses the EDI 811

The 811 has a narrower audience than the 810. The clearest users are:

Utilities are a common guess, but most US retail energy markets bill on the 810 under state-run guides, such as the New York DPS EDI standards. If a utility or other service provider asks for an 811, its guide will say so.

How 811 Billing Works

A monthly telecom 811 cycle typically runs like this:

1. Account setup. The customer and carrier agree which billing accounts will be sent by EDI, whether consolidated, and over which channel (VAN, AS2 or SFTP).
2. Bill close. The carrier closes the billing period and generates the bill from its billing system.
3. 811 build. The heading carries the invoice number, account and period. The detail carries the charges in an HL hierarchy. The summary carries the current charges in TDS and the account balance in BAL.
4. Transmit and acknowledge. The customer returns a 997 to confirm the 811 arrived and parsed.
5. Audit and allocate. The customer's AP or telecom expense system checks the totals, matches charges to contracts and cost centers, and flags disputes.
6. Pay. The customer pays, often with an 820 payment order/remittance advice that quotes the invoice number from BIG02.

There is no purchase order and no receipt to match against, so the usual three-way match does not apply. Audit against the contract rates and the previous month's bill instead.

The 811 Billing Hierarchy (HL Levels)

The detail area of the 811 is a set of HL loops. In telecom billing, HL03 uses numbered level codes defined in the X12 code list and used by the ATIS conventions:

HL01 numbers each level, HL02 points to its parent, and HL04 says whether children follow (1) or not (0). A summary-only 811 uses levels 1 and 4. A detailed bill adds categories, charge detail and call detail under the group they support. The DoD guide notes that federal 811s must use levels 1 and 4, and that when a level 4 has no children, several IT1 loops can sit under it.

Interactive Example: Monthly Telecom Bill (Single Account)

A telecom carrier bills a food distributor for October. The heading names the invoice, the billing account (REF*12), the period (DTM 186 and 187), the due date and both parties. Level 1 is the carrier with its billing contact and $14.62 of tax. Level 4 holds two charges as monetary (M4) IT1 lines: $185.00 of monthly service and $31.00 of usage for 1,240 minutes. TDS shows $230.62 of current charges, and BAL shows last month's $198.40, the payment against it, and the $230.62 now due. All names and numbers are fictional.

Use the Plain English tab for a readable summary, or click any segment to see its elements.

811 Structure at a Glance

The 811 standard is large: detail loops nest to four levels, and the X12 structure includes segments for vehicles, installments and rating factors that telecom bills rarely use. Each carrier's guide names the subset it sends.

Key Segments Explained

BIG: Beginning Segment for Invoice

BIG*20261101*NW04722191101*****DI~

BIG07 decides how AP treats the document. Codes in the X12 list include DI (debit invoice), CD (consolidated debit invoice), CE (consolidated credit invoice), DR (debit memo), CR (credit memo), ME (memorandum) and FB (final bill). On a consolidated account, Granite's guide sends the master bill as CD and each sub-account as a memo, so only the master is payable. Paying both is the classic consolidated-billing mistake.

The ATIS conventions recommend a unique invoice number, and some carriers build it from the account number plus the bill date, as in the example.

REF and DTM: Account and Billing Period

REF*12*0472219~
DTM*186*20261001~
DTM*187*20261031~

REF01 qualifies the account. Common qualifiers on telecom 811s are 12 (billing account), 14 (master account) and 11 (account number, used for sub-accounts), but the carrier's guide decides which it sends where. DTM with 186 and 187 gives the start and end of the billing period. Use the billing account, not the invoice number, as the key for allocating charges month to month.

HL: Hierarchical Level

HL*1**1*1~
HL*2*1*4*0~

Build your parser to follow HL02, not segment order. Detailed bills can interleave many levels, and the parent pointer is the only reliable way to roll charges up.

IT1: Baseline Item Data (Invoice)

IT1*2*1240*M4*31.00**SV*0700~

The M4 convention is what trips up teams who reuse their 810 map. On a product invoice, line amount is quantity times unit price. On a telecom 811 with IT103 = M4, IT104 already is the amount, and the DoD guide notes that with M4 the extended pricing rules do not apply. Multiply 1,240 by $31.00 and you have billed yourself $38,440.

The charge type codes in IT107 come from the telecom conventions, not from X12 itself. Granite's guide, for example, uses 0110 for recurring charges, 0400 for adjustments and 0700 for usage. Load the list from your carrier's guide and map each code to a GL account.

TXI: Tax Information

TXI*TX*14.62~

TXI01 is the tax type (TX = all taxes) and TXI02 the amount. Carriers send tax at several levels: a total at level 1, taxes per charge line, or exemption status in the heading. Pick one level to post from, or you will count the same tax twice.

TDS: Total Monetary Value Summary

TDS*23062~

TDS01 is the current charges total with two implied decimals: 23062 is $230.62. It includes taxes and the detail charges, but the DoD convention notes it does not include amounts billed only in the summary area. In the example, $185.00 + $31.00 + $14.62 = $230.62.

BAL: Balance Detail

BAL*P*PB*198.40~
BAL*M*TP*-198.40~
BAL*M*TT*230.62~

BAL is the statement half of "invoice/statement". It shows how this month's amount due was reached: previous balance, plus adjustments, minus payments, plus current charges. Unlike TDS, the amounts carry an explicit decimal point. Pay from TDS for the current invoice, and use BAL to spot payments the carrier has not applied.

Consolidated Billing: Master and Sub-Accounts

The "consolidated" in the name is about rolling many accounts into one bill. A business with 60 branch phone accounts can receive a single payable bill for the master account and still see each branch's charges.

Carriers do this in two ways, and the guide will tell you which:

• One transaction, many levels. The master 811 carries a level 2 (billing arrangement) loop for each sub-account, each with its own level 4 charge group. You pay the master TDS.
• Master plus memo transactions. The master 811 (for example BIG07 = CD) summarizes each sub-account, and a separate memo 811 for each sub-account (for example BIG07 = ME) carries its detail and billing period. Only the master is payable.

Either way, allocate costs from the sub-account detail and pay from the master total. If your AP system treats each memo as an invoice, it will pay every branch twice.

EDI 811 vs 810 and Related Documents

The short version: if you are billing for goods, use the 810. The 811 is for bills that are really statements of account, where the structure of accounts and charges matters as much as the total.

Common 811 Errors and How to Prevent Them

Run a sample bill through the free EDI inspector before you build the map. It shows the HL tree, the charge lines and the totals side by side, which makes M4 and decimal mistakes easy to spot.

811 Implementation Checklist

• Get the carrier's 811 guide and its industry charge code list
• Confirm single-account or consolidated billing, and whether memo 811s are sent
• Confirm which HL levels you will receive: summary only (1 and 4) or full detail
• Map REF account qualifiers to your account master and cost centers
• Handle M4 charge lines separately from priced lines
• Pick one tax level to post from
• Reconcile TDS to the sum of detail charges and taxes on every bill
• Track BAL against your payment history
• Return a 997 for every 811, and pay with an 820 that quotes BIG02
• Test with a real prior-month bill, including a credit and a final bill if you can get them

For the wider picture of which X12 documents your partners may ask for, see the EDI document types reference.

Where OrderSync Fits

The 811 is money going out: a carrier billing you. Most of the documents that keep an operations team busy are money coming in: customer purchase orders arriving as EDI 850s and 875s, PDFs, emails and spreadsheets that someone keys into the ERP.

OrderSync reads those inbound orders in any format, matches customers, items and units to your catalog, and outputs clean orders to your ERP or valid X12. Paste any 811 into the free EDI inspector to see its billing hierarchy in plain English, read how multi-format order processing works, or book a 15-minute walkthrough to see your own orders processed.

Frequently Asked Questions