Product / purchase order entry automation
AI order entry: customer POs from email and PDF into sales orders
Retailers on EDI send orders electronically, but most customers don't. Independent stores, regional chains, restaurants and other distributors email a PDF, a spreadsheet or just a message, and someone on your team types every line into the ERP. It's slow, it piles up on busy days, and a wrong item or quantity becomes a short ship or a credit later. Reading messy POs reliably only became practical recently, so most teams your size still do it by hand.
How it is done by hand today
- Someone watches the orders inbox and opens each PO as it arrives.
- They look up the customer and match each line to an item number, often from the customer's own part numbers.
- They key every line, price and ship date into the ERP as a sales order.
- Mistakes surface later as short ships, wrong items or pricing disputes.
What the runbook does
- Watches the orders inbox and reads each PO, whether it's in the email body, a PDF or a spreadsheet.
- Matches the customer and each line to your items, prices and ship-to addresses.
- Creates the sales order in your ERP.
- Flags anything that doesn't match, such as an unknown item, a price change or an odd quantity, for a person to check.
What it costs you today
Count how many POs arrive by email in a normal week and how long one takes to key in. Forty a day at five minutes each is over 800 hours a year. The order entry automation we built reads incoming POs from email and PDF and creates the sales orders in NetSuite, and runs in production at a $100M+/yr consumer brand. Send us a few recent POs and we'll show you them entered automatically, for free.
Questions we get
Which ERPs does it work with?
The one in production runs on NetSuite. The same approach works with QuickBooks, Acumatica, Dynamics or any system with an API.
What about messy or handwritten POs?
Typed PDFs, spreadsheets and email bodies are the common case and work well. Anything the automation can't read with confidence is flagged for a person instead of guessed.
Does it replace EDI?
No. EDI orders keep flowing as they do now. This covers the customers who email their orders instead.
How long until it is live?
Three to four weeks from kickoff, including a week running beside your team before it enters orders on its own.
Bring this workflow to a call and we will quantify what it costs you, free, in a week.