If you supply modern trade — supermarket chains, hypermarkets, cash-and-carry, large institutional buyers — you know the routine. The buyer's system generates a purchase order, it lands in an inbox as a PDF, and someone on your team types it into your own system as a sales order. Line by line. Item code, quantity, price, delivery date, store or distribution centre.
It works until it doesn't. A transposed digit ships the wrong quantity. A price that changed last month is entered at the old rate. A delivery window is missed because the PO sat unread over a weekend. Each of these comes back weeks later as a deduction on the chain's payment.
Why PO entry goes wrong
Retyping is not a skill problem, it is a design problem:
- Every chain's PO looks different. Item codes, units, tax treatment and layout vary by buyer.
- Volume arrives in bursts — month starts, festive seasons, promotions — exactly when people are stretched.
- The PO and your sales order drift apart. Once typed, nobody compares the two again until the payment is short.
- Inboxes are shared. Two people pick up the same PO, or nobody does.
What good PO processing looks like
A modern trade order desk should be able to say, for every PO received:
- It was seen — received, from which buyer, when.
- It became an order — with the same items, quantities and prices as the PO.
- Differences were caught before dispatch, not after the invoice.
- It was delivered as asked, with proof.
- The invoice and any claims trace back to the PO.
How the PO Inbox works in Zaqnet
The PO Inbox sits inside the Orders app in ControlRoom. You connect the mailbox your buyers already send to — Gmail or Google Workspace, Outlook or Microsoft 365, or any IMAP mailbox. Nothing changes for the buyer.
When a PO arrives:
- The buyer is recognised from the sender, so the order is drafted against the right customer.
- The PO is read — from text PDFs directly, and from scanned ones through optical character recognition.
- A sales order is prepared with items, quantities, prices and dates, and placed in a review queue.
- Mismatches are flagged: an unknown item, a price that does not match your list, a missing date. You choose how prices, dates and GST should be treated in the PO Inbox settings.
- The original email and files stay attached to the order, so anyone can open the source document later.
A person reviews and confirms. That single check replaces typing the whole order, and it is the moment differences get fixed — while they are still cheap.
Automating PO entry is not about removing people from the order desk. It is about moving them from typing to checking.
After the order: delivery and claims
Converting the PO is half the job. Modern trade pays on what was delivered, against the PO, by the appointment date. In Zaqnet the same order flows on to dispatch, where drivers capture proof of delivery in GroundLink — who received it, with a signature or photo. When a chain later deducts for short supply, you have the PO, the order and the signed delivery side by side.
Worked example: what retyping costs
A supplier receives 40 POs a day from retail chains, averaging 25 lines each — 1,000 lines typed a day. At two minutes a line, that is over 33 hours of typing a day: four people doing nothing else.
Now the errors. Careful typists still get perhaps 1 line in 200 wrong — a transposed digit, last month's price, the wrong pack size. That's five wrong lines a day, around 1,500 a year. Each becomes a short or wrong delivery, a rejected consignment at the distribution centre, or a deduction on the chain's payment.
Reviewing a drafted order takes a fraction of the time of typing it, and the check is aimed at the lines the system flagged.
What to check on every PO
| Check | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Buyer and ship-to location | Delivering to the wrong DC is a full return trip |
| Item codes mapped to yours | Chains use their own article codes |
| Pack size and unit | Cases vs pieces is the classic error |
| Price against your agreed list | A mismatch becomes a deduction later |
| Delivery date and appointment window | Late delivery can mean rejection |
| PO validity | Expired POs may not be honoured |
| Tax treatment | Wrong GST breaks the invoice match |
Turnaround: the number that matters
Track PO to confirmed order in hours, by buyer. Chains measure your fill rate and on-time delivery; both start with how quickly a PO becomes an order someone can pick. A PO that sits in an inbox over a weekend loses two days of a five-day delivery window. See PO fill rate for what chains measure.
Where to start
Pick your two or three largest modern trade buyers and connect the inbox their POs come to. Run the PO Inbox alongside your current process for a couple of weeks, compare the drafted orders with what your team would have typed, and you will see quickly where the time and the errors were going.
Use the calculator below to estimate what manual order entry costs you today.