Cin7 Sales Order Import for Cin7 Core and Cin7 Omni From Customer Purchase Order PDFs

Where Cin7 sales order entry still costs you hours

Cin7 is built for product brands and wholesalers that sell through several channels at once. Shopify, Amazon and B2B portal orders flow in on their own through integrations. The orders that do not are the ones a buyer at a regional chain, a boutique group or a distributor emails as a PDF purchase order. Somebody opens the attachment, finds the customer in Cin7, adds each SKU, types the quantities and prices, and checks the ship-to. For a 40 line wholesale order with sizes and colors that is a long, error-prone job, and it repeats every morning during the buying season.

Cin7 gives you three ways in for those orders. Cin7 Core has a CSV import for sale tasks and an AI add-on called Intelligent Document Recognition. Cin7 Omni has a spreadsheet import with column mapping. PurchaseOrders does the reading step in front of any of them: it turns the customer PDF into rows, so the import or the review is the only manual part left.

Importing sale tasks via CSV in Cin7 Core

In Cin7 Core the bulk route is the sale tasks import. You open Sales, then the Sales screen, click Import, choose the Sale tasks tab and download the CSV template. Cin7 is strict about that template. The header row must stay exactly as it is, all columns must be present in the template order, and the user needs the Sales: Purchase/Sale CSV Import permission. One file can hold up to 100 sale tasks.

The file is not one row per order. Each line has a RecordType in the first column, and lines are grouped into one sale by two mandatory fields: CustomerName in the second column and InvoiceNumber in the third. Every sale needs at least two records, the Invoice record that carries the header, both addresses, terms, location and price tier, plus at least one invoice line with a stock product. Imported sales arrive as authorized sale orders. Cin7 Core cannot import them as drafts, and the import creates new sales only, so you cannot export an order, edit it and re-import it to change it.

The validations are where hand-built files fail. Product must be the SKU of a non-deprecated stock product. Quantity must be positive, with up to 4 decimals. Price rounds to 7 decimals and discount to 2, from 0 to 100. The line Total must equal price, less discount, times quantity, rounded to cents. The Invoice record needs shipping and billing address line 1, city, province, postcode and a valid country, the tax rule must be an active one, and the invoice date must be in the past. Invalid lines are skipped, and Cin7 offers a download of the invalid lines with the error beside each one.

Intelligent Document Recognition and when it is enough

Cin7 Core also sells Intelligent Document Recognition (IDR), an add-on that reads received purchase orders and turns them into sales. You go to Sales, Import, choose IDR and upload PDF, JPG, BMP or PNG files of up to 5 MB each. After recognition you check the AI mapping, approve, and match each order line to a product in your inventory from a dropdown. Cin7 says IDR learns from each purchase order received from the same sender, and it can be trialed for 30 days.

The help article is clear about what IDR expects. Only one document per file. A customer is required. SKU and product name are required fields and must sit in separate columns. That last rule is where many real customer POs fall short, because a buyer prints their own item number and a description in one cell, not your SKU. If your customers send tidy one-order PDFs with your SKUs on them, IDR may be all you need. If they send multi-order files, their own part numbers, or a backlog of forty attachments at once, extracting the rows first and loading them in one CSV is faster.

Importing sales orders into Cin7 Omni

Cin7 Omni imports sales orders from a spreadsheet, not from a PDF. You go to Sales, Sales Orders, Actions, Import Sales Orders, upload the CSV or paste the data, map the columns, run Test and then Import New Sales Order. The rules matter. Every order needs a unique Order Ref that no other transaction uses, not even a purchase order. Item Code must match an existing product. Company, First Name or Last Name must match a CRM contact, or you choose to create one. Each spreadsheet must stay under 1,000 sales orders and 10,000 rows, with no order over 500 line items.

The customer purchase order number has its own field, Customer PO No, so put the buyer number there and keep your own Order Ref separate. Products with size grids go in Item Option 3 in a quantity x size format, and options, alternative units and BOM components each have their own row conventions. Omni also handles EDI 850 orders from trading partners through its EDI connections, so this workflow is for the PDF and email orders that do not come through EDI.

What PurchaseOrders does in the workflow

PurchaseOrders is the reading step. It takes the customer purchase order, any layout and any length, and returns the header and every line as Excel, CSV or JSON: customer PO number, order date, ship-by date, ship-to and bill-to, and for each line the buyer item number, description, quantity, unit and price. It does not log into Cin7 and does not post orders. You add your SKU and customer name, which is usually a lookup against a short cross-reference sheet, and paste the rows into the Core sale tasks template or the Omni import. Teams that clear a pile of attachments each morning use bulk purchase order upload to process up to 50 files at once.

The same approach works on other inventory systems. Wholesalers on Zoho use the Zoho Inventory sales order import, distributors running Fishbowl with QuickBooks use the Fishbowl sales order import, and teams that keep orders in QuickBooks itself use the QuickBooks sales order import. The wider picture, including how to measure time saved per order, is on sales order entry automation.