Turn emailed purchase orders into validated sales orders.
Emailed POs read once, checked against your price, stock and credit, and entered right the first time, with your order desk on the exceptions.
Sound familiar?
- The order desk retypes PDFs, sheets and scanned faxes into the ERP, about 12 minutes each.
- 11% of POs carry a price that doesn’t match the price book, and the mismatch is found after the order is keyed.
- A forwarded or revised PO quietly becomes a second order.
About 1,500 POs a month at 12 minutes each is 300 hours of the desk’s time, and every miskeyed line costs a credit or a call.
Brightline’s order desk, one week of emailed POs
Three hundred sixty POs, one inbox.
PDFs, spreadsheets, scans and forwards all land in the shared inbox. Each one is kept as it arrived.
Three hundred forty read and matched.
Part codes map through the approved cross-reference and units are converted. Twenty couldn’t be: an unknown code or an unreadable fax. They went to the desk.
Three hundred cleared price, stock and credit.
Checked before anything was entered. Forty stopped with a reason: a price that differs from the contract, a credit hold or short stock.
Two hundred eighty-eight became orders.
Each was entered once and read back. Twelve forwards were linked to orders that already existed, and revisions became amendments.
PO-641 became SO-812.
Three cases ship now and one waits for Thursday’s stock. Nothing was rekeyed, and the price came from the contract.
| PO-641 line | SO-812 line | Checked against | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| FL-30 · 3 cases | Line 1 · LID-16F · 3 cases | Q-728-R1, contract price $38 | Ships today |
| FL-30 · 1 case | Line 2 · LID-16F · 1 case | Stock arrives Thursday | Due Thursday |
| Total $152 | Total $152 | Quote and contract price | Matches |
| Buyer AC-204 | Net 30 · no holds | Credit status | Clear |
The original PDF stays attached to the order
What changes.
- Reading
- Staff read PDFs, sheets and faxes, then retype themEach PO read once into lines, with the original kept beside it
- Matching
- Customer part codes from one person’s spreadsheetAn approved cross-reference, owned by your team
- Checking
- Price, stock and credit checked after the order is keyedChecked before entry, with failures sent to the desk and the reason attached
- Changes
- A revision becomes a second orderA revision becomes an amendment to the first
- Review
- Never measuredMinutes of review per order, counted every week
How it works. 8 steps, 5 stages.
- AI1
- Rules and automation5
- Your team2
- Approval
1Receive
Rules and automation
Catch every PO in the shared inbox
PDFs, sheets and scans are pulled from the inbox, and the original is kept with the order.
- Outlook
2Read
AI
Read the lines, and tell a new PO from a change
Pulls out part codes, quantities, units and ship-to, and labels each message as a new order, a revision or a question.
Rules and automation
Match parts and units
Their part codes map to yours through the approved cross-reference, and cases and each are converted.
- Prophet 21
3Check
Rules and automation
Check price, stock and credit
Against the quote or contract price, live stock and the account’s credit status, before anything is entered.
- Prophet 21
Your teamApproval
Review and resolve
The desk spends a minute on each automated order and handles anything that failed a check, with the reason attached.
4Enter
Rules and automation
Enter the order, then read it back
The sales order is created in the ERP once, then compared with the PO to confirm they agree.
- Prophet 21
5Confirm
Rules and automation
Confirm with the buyer
An acknowledgment separates what’s accepted from what ships when.
- Outlook
Your team
Sample and tune each week
The desk reads a sample of finished orders and adjusts the rules.
Every correction updates the cross-reference
What you get. Real work, every week.
| PO-641 line | SO-812 line | Checked against | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| FL-30 · 3 cases | Line 1 · LID-16F · 3 cases | Q-728-R1, contract price $38 | Ships today |
| FL-30 · 1 case | Line 2 · LID-16F · 1 case | Stock arrives Thursday | Due Thursday |
| Total $152 | Total $152 | Quote and contract price | Matches |
| Buyer AC-204 | Net 30 · no holds | Credit status | Clear |
The original PDF stays attached to the order
The order desk’s view: the PO as sent, the order as entered, and what each line was checked against.
- Price differs from contractThe PO price against the contract price24Held for approval
- Unknown part codeThe buyer’s code isn’t in the cross-reference yet14Desk adds the match
- Duplicate forwardsThe same PO, sent again12Linked to the first
- Credit holdOver limit or past due9With accounts receivable
Short stock (7) and unreadable faxes (6) make up the rest
The orders that weren’t entered this week, grouped by why. The desk works from this list.
We have your order. Three cases ship today, one on Thursday.
- Accepted
- 4 cases of LID-16F at $38 = $152
- Ships today
- 3 cases · $114
- Pending
- 1 case · due Thursday · $38
- Your PO
- PO-641, against quote Q-728-R1
What the buyer gets back: what’s accepted, and what ships when.
How you’ll know it’s working.
Correctly accepted orders
Orders entered right the first time, with failed and diverted ones counted in the total.
Minutes per eligible order
Handling, review and monitoring added together.
Price mismatches on invoice
Today 11% of POs carry a price that doesn’t match.
Baselines agreed before we build.
- Emailed POs, handled by hand today
- 1,500 × 12 min = 300 hours
- Automated, with a minute of review each
- 1,200 POs = 20 hours
- Still handled by hand
- 300 POs = 60 hours
- Monitoring
- 25 hours
- Hours released
- 195, worth $8,190 at $42 an hour
- Build over 24 months plus running cost
- $2,500 + $3,000 = $5,500
- Left over each month
- +$2,690
At five minutes of review per order the same setup releases 115 hours, worth $4,830, and loses $670 a month. Hours are cash only if volume grows without hiring, or the time goes to work that pays.
Works with what you have.
ERP, CRM & inbox
- Outlook
- Prophet 21
- Business Central
Order & quote automation
- Proton
- Conexiom
- Esker
- We configure first
- Proton, Conexiom and Esker read orders from email, and some ERPs have an agent of their own. We test them on a month of your POs first. Accounts that already send EDI or PunchOut orders stay on them.
- We build when
- The checks that matter, such as cross-references, contract price, credit and amendments, have to work together before anything reaches your ERP.
What a first build includes.
Built in your accounts, around your team. Scope, fee and baseline agreed before we start.
- 1Design
- 2Build
- 3Run it, or hand it over
We build
- PO reading for emails, PDFs, sheets and scans
- An approved cross-reference and unit rules
- Price, stock and credit checks before entry
- A supported write path into your ERP, with read-back and duplicate protection
We start from
- Three months of emailed POs
- Customer part-number cross-references
- ERP items, contracts, stock and credit status
- ERP API access and a test company
From your team
- Owner
- Order desk lead, with the VP of sales and service
- Involves
- Order desk
- Inside sales
- Finance
- ERP administration
Questions teams ask.
Why not use the ERP’s own order agent, or a specialist tool?
Sometimes you should. They read orders well, and some are enough on their own. We test them on your POs, and add only what’s missing, usually the cross-reference, the contract price check and amendments.
Which orders go through without a person?
You decide. We start with a person confirming every order in about a minute, and measure it. Only repeat orders from clean accounts, where every check passes, are candidates to go through without a look.
Does it work at scale?
A vendor-hosted Conexiom case study describes a distributor, ADI, automating about 1,700 orders a day and saving roughly five minutes of rekeying on each, around 142 hours of capacity a day. It’s undated, so read it as a sign the mechanism is possible, not a result to expect.
Who owns it once it’s running?
You do. It’s built in your accounts, documented, with training for the people who run it. Ownership usually sits with your order desk lead, with the VP of sales and service. We can keep running it with you, or step back.
How do we start?
Usually with an order desk review: two to four weeks, a fixed fee credited to the build, and a plan that’s yours. If the job is already clear, we can scope the build directly.
Part of your order engine. One of 14 use cases, in 5 parts.
See the whole order engineIn orders
Works with
Enter every order right the first time. Start with an order desk review.
We reply within one business day.