The nightly EDI export

For a system with a nightly batch-import step and no API of its own, the EDI export is a single CSV file dropped every night, with every column your case-management system needs already flattened out.

What it is

Every night at 02:00 UK time, HousingSurvey Pro builds one CSV per organisation covering finalized surveys and work orders, and stores it at a per-organisation path you can download from a signed URL. The file starts with core survey and work-order fields, then appends — never inserts — further column groups over time: the statutory (Awaab’s Law) columns telling one work order’s whole statutory story, hazard-agnostic finding columns, and hazard-triage/emergency-actions columns. New columns only ever land at the end of the row, so a consumer reading by column position never breaks when the schema grows.

Before you start

The nightly export and running it on demand both require the Platform plan and organisation-admin access to Settings.

How to do it

1. Open Settings → Data & exports.
2. Toggle nightly (02:00 UK) to have the export run automatically every night for as long as it stays on.
3. To pull a one-off file without waiting for the schedule, pick a date range under EDI flat-file (CSV) and click Run now — this produces exactly the same column layout the nightly run does, synchronously, so you can validate it before committing to the schedule.
4. Optionally set an SFTP delivery destination alongside the CSV download, so the same file also lands automatically on a server your team already controls — see Sending and pulling files over SFTP.
5. Each run appears in the run history with a fresh, short-lived signed URL each time you open it — a URL from an earlier session should never be trusted or reused directly.

How it integrates

A revised report never overwrites the original row: the finding stays keyed by property, and each survey’s versionNo/supersedes columns work exactly like the same fields on a webhook payload or a REST API response, so your import job can key stored reports the same way regardless of which channel it reads from. Every export — nightly or on-demand — never alters or removes the underlying evidence; it only reads what’s already sealed.

Common problems

• The nightly run didn’t produce a file. Check there were finalized records for that day — an org with nothing new to export simply has nothing to drop that night.
• Our import job broke after an update. New columns are always appended at the end of the row, never inserted in the middle — check your parser is reading by header name rather than a fixed column count.
• The whole section shows an upgrade notice. The nightly EDI export is a Platform-plan feature.