Accounting For Electronic Data Interchange Fees

Your warehouse charges you an Electronic Data Interchange fee – a fee for formatting messages and in your case I assume orders and I assume this warehouse is an independent vendor not owned by your company. They most likely also charge you shipping. If you expense the shipping to a shipping expense line, you could create an EDI expense line and charge these fees there.
My question for you is, does your company require the format of the messages back and forth and is it cumbersome to meet your requirements so that the warehouse is offsetting its own costs to its customer? We seldom agree to pay EDI fees – and most of our vendors have met our simple data exchange demands. We have one vendor that said it would have to do quite a bit of work on their IT side to accept our transfer of data and we agreed to pay an upfront development fee of several thousand dollars with no future charges.