Standards
Global Location Number (GLN)
A GS1 identifier for parties and locations in business processes.
- Kind
- Identifiers
- Steward
- GS1
- Official source
- https://www.gs1.org/standards/id-keys/gln
What it describes
A GLN identifies a party or location under GS1 rules. It can refer to a legal entity, function, physical location, or digital location, depending on how it was allocated and described. In supply chains, it helps records distinguish where goods were shipped, billed, received, or administered. The associated reference data is necessary to understand which kind of party or place a given GLN names.
A GLN should not be treated as a postal address or as proof that a location is currently operating. Location descriptions and responsible parties can change. The identifier also differs from a GTIN, which identifies a trade item. Preserve the source's GLN role, location details, and effective date when reconciling transactions across organizations.
Structure
Thirteen numeric digits, including a GS1 mod-10 check digit.
Useful for
- Identify ship-to and bill-to parties.
- Reconcile location records across trading partners.
- Separate party roles in transactions.
Limits
- May identify different kinds of party or location.
- Does not itself supply an address.
- Does not identify a trade item.
How it is used in practice
A GLN answers the questions asked in every shipment and invoice: who is sending, who is receiving, who pays and where the goods go. Trading partners exchange GLNs in electronic messages so that a ship-to location is identified by a code both sides share, not by a postal address that one side abbreviates and the other spells out. GS1 licenses company prefixes, and a company allocates GLNs under its prefix to its legal entity, its functions and its physical sites.
The key idea is granularity. A hospital group, a hospital in that group, a pharmacy in the hospital and the receiving dock of the pharmacy can each hold a GLN. Which of those a given GLN names is not visible in the digits. It is stated in the reference data that the allocating company maintains and shares with its partners.
A worked example
A fictional distributor ships a pallet to the Halden Regional Hospital. The advance shipping notice names a ship-to GLN. The hospital's receiving system records the pallet against a different GLN, that of the pharmacy within the hospital.
A matching rule that compares GLNs for equality reports a mismatch. A better rule consults the hospital's published location hierarchy and finds that the pharmacy GLN is a child of the hospital GLN. The resulting statement is that the receiving location is a part of the named ship-to location, with the hierarchy source and its date cited. A different outcome would arise if the hierarchy showed the two GLNs as unrelated: then the shipment would be flagged as delivered to a location other than the one on the notice, and the record would keep both codes and the evidence for each.
Evaluating a claim that rests on a GLN
The first question is the role of the GLN: legal entity, function, physical location or digital location. A claim that a company operates at a site needs a GLN of the physical-location kind with a dated description, and a GLN naming a legal entity cannot support it. The second question is the date. Locations open, close and change responsible party, and the GLN data held by a partner may lag behind. The third is the source of the data: a GLN published by the allocating company is better evidence than one transcribed by a third party.
A GLN does not contain an address, and a record that stores an address next to a GLN is storing two claims that should each have a source. When the address changes, the GLN may or may not change under the allocation rules, and a system that assumes one or the other will eventually produce a false match or a false split.
Confusions to avoid
The GLN differs from a postal address, a geographic coordinate and a registry number. It names a party or location in GS1's scheme, and the same site can also have a coordinate, an address and an identifier in a company registry or an LEI for the legal entity. A well-formed record keeps these as separate attributes, each with a source and date, and links them by explicit statements.
It is also easy to confuse with the GTIN, because both belong to GS1 and both use a check digit. The GTIN names a product, and the GLN names a place or party. A column labelled simply "GS1 code" invites mixing them, and the check digit will not reveal the mistake because the algorithm is the same.
Questions a reviewer can ask
What kind of party or location does the GLN name according to the allocating company's data? On what date was that description valid? Does the claim need a legal entity, a function or a physical site? Does the receiving system use the same level as the sending system? If a location hierarchy was used to equate two GLNs, who published it, and when? Is any address stored with the code sourced separately from the code?
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Enquiry
Which of your sources carry Global Location Number (GLN)?
Tell us which sources carry it, which key the same entity some other way and who may read which. We reply with whether and how a first record would use this identifier.
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