Email & PDF PO-to-Order Parser: Stop Re-Typing Purchase Orders

The problem this kills

A purchase order lands in the shared inbox. Sometimes it's typed in the body of an email, sometimes it's a PDF attachment, sometimes it's a scan of a scan. A rep opens it, squints at the layout, figures out which of their parts each line refers to, looks up the price, checks the ship-to, copies the customer's PO number, and keys the whole thing into the ERP line by line. Then the next PO arrives, in a totally different layout, and they start over.

It's slow, it's error-prone, and it doesn't scale: a fat-fingered quantity, a wrong SKU because two parts have similar descriptions, a stale price, a PO entered twice because two people grabbed it from the inbox. None of this needs a developer to fix — you can build the tool that does the reading and matching, and keep a human in charge of the decision.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. You forward a PO email to it (or upload the PDF, or paste the text), and you load two reference files once: your SKU / price master and your customer master. The tool uses AI to extract the PO header (customer, their PO number, ship-to, dates, terms) and every line item (their part description, quantity, unit price). It then matches each line to your SKU and looks up your price, flags any line it can't match and any price that disagrees with your master, and identifies the customer. It shows a reviewer a clean draft order — matched SKUs, quantities, prices, ship-to, the customer PO number — side by side with the original. The reviewer fixes the flagged lines and clicks Approve. Only then does the draft become a saved order and a downloadable ERP-ready import CSV in the exact columns your system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how POs arrive today and who keys them, what your SKU and price master columns are named, how customers refer to your parts (their part numbers vs yours), your typical and peak PO volumes, your pricing and approval rules, and your messy edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the matching logic, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the inbound capture, the AI extraction, the SKU and price matching, the reviewer fix-and-approve screen, the order save, and the ERP-CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today with no integration into your ERP at all.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real order-entry tooling, so it ships with the controls an operations team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's POs and orders, a complete audit trail of who reviewed, edited, and approved which order and when, a hard human-approval gate so no order is saved and no ERP file is produced until a reviewer signs off, and duplicate guards keyed on customer + customer PO number so the same PO can't be processed twice (with a clear warning when a PO is re-forwarded). Every SKU and price is validated against your master, and any mismatch is surfaced for the reviewer instead of silently committed.

Who it's for

Customer service reps, order-entry clerks, and inside-sales teams who today read a PO email and key it line by line into the ERP. If you can describe how you decide which of your parts a customer's line refers to, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll watch your first forwarded PO turn into a clean draft order the same afternoon.