3-8%
manual line-error rate eliminated
5-8 min
of keying removed per order
10-25×
ROI vs. manual entry
Same day
to first touchless order
The purchase orders nobody wants to type
When a customer emails a purchase order, someone on your team becomes a human OCR engine: reading the PO number, matching the customer, finding each SKU, checking the price, and entering quantities, often across 10 screens and dozens of clicks. It's slow, it's expensive, and it's where wrong-SKU and wrong-price errors creep in.
Purchase order automation replaces that work. OrderPier captures the document, extracts the structured data, validates it, and writes the order, so your team reviews exceptions instead of typing every order. At $0.30-$0.66 per order against the $8-$15 a manual entry costs, the return runs 10-25× before you count the avoided errors.
From attachment to order
- Capture: forward the email or connect a shared mailbox.
- Extract: every header field and line item, read from the PDF directly.
- Validate: customer, items, pricing, and availability checked against your ERP.
- Post: a sales order is created. Exceptions route to review.
Built for the long tail
EDI covers your biggest trading partners. Purchase order automation covers everyone else, the regional accounts, the one-off reorders, the customer who will only ever send a PDF. That long tail is usually a quarter of your order volume and most of your manual effort. The full EDI comparison has its own page, linked below.
PO automation questions
- What PO formats can it read?
- Digital PDFs, scanned and faxed documents, images, and plain-text email bodies. Because extraction is LLM-based, new and unusual layouts work without setup.
- Can it match customer part numbers to our SKUs?
- Yes. Line items are matched to your item master, including customer-specific part numbers and descriptions, with pricing validated before the order is created.
- Is there an API?
- Yes, on Scale and Enterprise plans. You can also run everything through email forwarding with no integration work.