desadv: the field the standard wrote for your ASN.

31 July 2026 · the launch journal

If you have ever wondered where an Advanced Shipment Notice belongs in an EPCIS event, the standard answered before you asked. CBV 2.0 §7.3, defining the business-transaction type vocabulary:

"Despatch Advice. A document/message by means of which the seller or consignor informs the consignee about the despatch of goods. Also called an 'Advanced Shipment Notice,' but the value desadv is always used regardless of local nomenclature."

The same section defines po (purchase order), inv (invoice), bol (bill of lading), prodorder and recadv (receiving advice). And §8.5 makes the field universal: business-transaction identifiers "populate the 'why' dimension of EPCIS events," including "the bizTransactionList field in all EPCIS event types" — every ObjectEvent and AggregationEvent, not just TransactionEvent.

That gives a despatch advice four spec-sanctioned landing points on events, zero extensions:

1. The document reference — bizTransactionList: [{ "type": "desadv", ... }, { "type": "po", ... }] (CBV 2.0 §7.3, §8.5).
2. The parties — seller and buyer GLNs as owning_party, ship-from and ship-to as location, in sourceList/destinationList (§7.4, §8.7).
3. The lines — GTIN-grain quantities and serials, the same grain as epcList and quantityList; the ASN's packing tree is an aggregation tree, SSCC as parentID.
4. The master data — trade-item attributes (§9.2), location and party attributes (§9.3), and document-level master data in the EPCIS header.

None of this is prospective. The official JSON-LD context GS1 publishes maps "desadv": "cbv:BTT-desadv" and "po": "cbv:BTT-po" — vendored on this origin, sha256-pinned on the conformance page — and the golden corpus commits a TransactionEvent fixture carrying a po reference as a GDTI URI. The standard's own vocabulary, in pinned artifacts, checkable without asking anyone.

The full argument, join by join, is The standard already has a field for your purchase order. The layer that compiles documents down to those fields — X12, EDIFACT/EANCOM, and API-native JSON alike — is /business-transactions/.