Email order entry for wholesale distributors
· 2 minute read · Tim
Most wholesale orders still arrive as an email with a PDF attached. Here is what email order entry actually involves, and where the time goes.
Email order entry is the work of turning a customer’s emailed purchase order into a sales order in your ERP. The customer does not log into a portal and does not send EDI. They email a PDF, or they type the order in the body of the message, and someone on your side keys it in.
What actually arrives
On public forums, distributors describe the same morning. A shared inbox. Purchase orders as PDF attachments. Sometimes a spreadsheet. Sometimes the lines written out in the email itself. Parts businesses talk about a few dozen a day. A B2B apparel brand on r/automation described hundreds, each one naming style, colour, size, and quantity.
The formats do not match. One customer puts their item code in the first column. The next puts a description and expects you to know the SKU. A third changes the layout halfway through the year and nobody tells you. The person keying the order is also the person who knows which account, which ship-to, and which price tier that customer is on.
Why a spreadsheet export still leaves the work
A common first step is to pull the PDF into a table, then upload a CSV. That removes some of the typing. It does not answer the questions the ERP will ask: which customer record is this, which of your products is their code, and is the price on the PO the price on their tier?
People who have tried a generic parser say the same thing. You get text off the page. You still reconcile it before anyone can post a sales order. The mistakes that slip through tend to show up later, in fulfilment or at invoicing, when they are slower to fix.
A flow that leaves the customer alone
Customers already know how to email a purchase order. Asking every account to switch to a portal, a spreadsheet template, or EDI is a project of its own, and the smaller accounts will not do it. Email order entry works when their habit stays the same and your side stops retyping.
With OrderWiz, each company gets an inbound email address. You forward the customer’s order, PDF or the original email, or you upload the file. Lines are read, mapped to your catalog, and checked against that customer’s price tier. You confirm. Then the sales order posts into the ERP you already run.
The next piece of this is the document itself: how a PDF purchase order becomes a sales order.
If this is how orders still land on your team, tell us how they come in.
Written by Tim, who built OrderWiz after working in wholesale distribution.
