Your customer sends a purchase order. Somebody on your team retypes it into the ERP as a sales order. That single act of transcription is where wrong quantities, stale contract prices, and missed ship dates come from. PurchaseOrders reads the incoming customer PO with AI and hands back the customer, PO number, requested delivery date, and every line with its SKU, quantity, unit of measure, and price. Upload a customer order below.
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Large customers send EDI. Everyone else emails a PDF, uploads to a portal, or faxes a scan. Distributors and manufacturers end up with customer service reps who spend most of the morning reading somebody else's purchase order and keying it into a sales order screen, one line at a time, against a clock.
Email attachment, customer portal download, fax, a photo from a job site, and EDI 850 for the handful of accounts big enough to demand it. Only the last one lands as data. The rest land as pictures of data.
Ship 100 instead of 10 and you pay for the freight out, the return, the credit memo, and the phone call. Order entry errors are rarely caught by the customer until the pallet arrives, and by then the margin on that order is gone.
The customer's PO shows the price they think they have. The contract shows the price they actually negotiated. Checking line by line takes real minutes, so under a backlog it gets skipped and the difference shows up in a dispute.
The requested ship date is on the PO, but nobody sees it until the order is keyed. Orders are worked in the sequence they were opened rather than the sequence the customer needs, which is how a same-day request sits until Thursday.
Sales order entry has two halves. One half is transcription: getting the customer's document into fields. The other half is judgment: validating the customer, checking the contract price, confirming credit, confirming availability, and posting the order. Only the first half should ever be automated by a document tool, and it is the half that eats the day.
Each customer designs their own purchase order. The AI reads fields by meaning, so a new account's first order is captured correctly without anyone building a template for it.
Customer part number, description, quantity, unit of measure, unit price, and line total for every row, joined across pages, so nothing is dropped between page two and page three.
The date the customer asked for is extracted with the rest of the header, which lets you triage the queue by promise date instead of by arrival order.
Export Excel, CSV, or JSON, or pull it through the REST API. Your ERP still runs pricing, credit, and availability checks against real data instead of a transcription.
The document a customer sends you is a purchase order, which is why the same extraction applies. If you also buy, the identical output covers purchase order automation software on the buy side. The mechanics are described in the purchase order parser and in purchase order line item extraction. High volume goes through bulk purchase order upload or the purchase order API. To understand why smaller customers still send PDFs, read EDI versus PDF purchase orders, and for the document distinction itself, purchase order versus sales order. Weighing enterprise platforms? See the Conexiom alternative and Esker alternative comparisons.
Where the data comes from, and what each approach genuinely does. Including what PurchaseOrders does not do.
| PurchaseOrders (capture layer) | Manual order entry | Enterprise order automation platform | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads a PDF, scan, or photo customer PO | Yes, AI reads any layout in seconds | A person reads it | Yes |
| Captures the full order line table | Yes, across multi-page orders | Yes, if there is time | Yes |
| Posts the sales order into the ERP | No, you load or API the data in | Yes, by hand | Yes, touchless when rules pass |
| Runs pricing, credit, and availability rules | No, your ERP does | The rep does, manually | Yes, configured during implementation |
| Cross-references customer part numbers | Captures them; mapping stays in your ERP | Rep looks them up | Yes, once mapped |
| Handles a first-time customer layout | Yes, no setup | Yes | Usually needs configuration |
| Time to start | Minutes, self-serve | Already running | Months, with a sales cycle first |
| Pricing | Free to try, then per document | Staff hours that scale with volume | Custom enterprise quote |
PurchaseOrders is a document extraction tool, not an order management platform. It does not post sales orders, apply pricing or credit rules, check availability, or send acknowledgments. Platforms such as Esker and Conexiom automate that end-to-end flow. This tool removes the transcription step and gives your ERP or your rep clean data to work from.
Take one order sitting in the sales inbox right now.
Drag in the PDF attachment, the portal download, or a scan. Batch a morning's worth if the queue is deep.
Tip: Try a customer whose PO layout your team complains about.
Customer, their PO number, requested ship date, ship-to address, payment terms, and each line with part number, quantity, unit of measure, and price come back as fields you check on screen.
Load the CSV into your ERP import, or send the JSON through the API. Your rep validates pricing and credit against a structured order instead of squinting at page three of a PDF.
Sales order entry automation uses software to turn an incoming customer purchase order into a sales order in your ERP without a person retyping it. The capture layer reads the document and produces structured fields; the ERP applies pricing, credit, and availability rules and posts the order.
OCR order entry means using optical character recognition to read customer purchase orders that arrive as scans, faxes, or PDFs, so the text can be loaded into an order system. Modern tools pair OCR with AI that understands which text is a quantity and which is a part number, rather than reading characters by fixed position.
Remove the transcription step. Most order entry errors are transposition: a quantity, a part number, or a date typed wrong under time pressure. Extracting fields directly from the customer document and validating them on screen keeps the human on the judgment work, which is where attention actually pays off.
Yes. EDI only covers customers willing to build and maintain a connection, which in most US distributors is a small share of accounts. Document extraction works on whatever the rest of them send: an emailed PDF, a portal download, a fax, or a photograph of a signed order.
No. It returns clean structured data as Excel, CSV, JSON, or an API response. Posting the sales order, applying contract pricing, running the credit check, and confirming availability all stay in your ERP or order management system, where those rules belong and where an audit trail already exists.
A purchase order is issued by the buyer to request goods. A sales order is created by the seller to confirm and fulfill that request. They describe the same transaction from opposite sides, which is why the seller's sales order is usually keyed straight from the buyer's purchase order.
Esker and Conexiom automate the whole order flow, including business rules, ERP posting, and acknowledgments, sold as enterprise implementations with custom quotes. PurchaseOrders does the reading step only, self-serve, priced per document, with nothing to install. Different scope, and the right choice depends on whether you need touchless posting or accurate data.
Automate PO capture on the buy side.
How the parser reads any PO layout.
Compare with enterprise order automation.
Compare with Esker order management.
Capture every SKU, quantity, and price.
Pull order data programmatically.
