The AI order-entry FAQ

Software that turns the unstructured orders your customers already send — an email, a PDF, a spreadsheet, and in some tools a text, photo, or voicemail — into structured orders in your back office: the customer identified, each line matched to your catalog, the right price applied. You'll also see the category called AI order processing or order automation. In the serious tools a person confirms the structured draft before it goes anywhere — the AI takes over the retyping, and the judgment stays human.

They're different stages of the pipeline. OCR's job is turning a picture of text — a scan, a photo, a handwritten note — into machine-readable characters; AI order entry's job is turning order text into a structured order with matched items, quantities, and prices. Vendors bundle the two differently: Parseur and Conexiom-class tools include OCR so they can read scans and handwriting, while PeasyOrders reads only the text layer — email body, text-layer PDF, spreadsheet — and does no OCR at all.

EDI is structured order exchange between committed trading partners — both sides set up a standardized connection in advance, which makes sense at large-partner volume. AI order entry needs no setup on the customer's side: it reads the unstructured emails, PDFs, and messages that smaller buyers already send. Most wholesale distributors face the second problem — EDI is too heavy to set up with every small customer, which is exactly why the emails keep coming.

Yes — the email body is the core channel across the whole category. Conexiom, Esker, Choco, Pepper, and Cut+Dry all name email among their capture channels, and it's the center of PeasyOrders' span: it reads the email, the PDF attached, and the spreadsheet, and turns them into a draft a person reviews before it touches QuickBooks.

Yes, with one split that matters. A PDF with a text layer — the kind produced by procurement software, Word, or Excel — is reliably readable; a scanned or photographed PDF is an image, which needs OCR first. PeasyOrders parses text-layer PDFs with the same extraction it runs on the email body; scanned PDFs it deliberately doesn't parse — they're kept on the order and worked side by side instead.

That's the OCR line, and vendors sit on both sides of it. On the can side, per their own pages: Choco and Pepper capture photos, Cut+Dry's help docs cover images, Conexiom advertises image formats, and Parseur's OCR spans 200+ languages. PeasyOrders is on the can't side and says so just as plainly: it does no OCR, so scans and photos aren't parsed — an attachment it can't read stays on the order and your team works it in a side-by-side view, so no order is rejected for its format.

Elsewhere in the category, yes: Conexiom advertises extraction from 'even handwritten notes,' Cut+Dry's help docs list handwritten notes among what its AI Order Desk drafts from, and Parseur's OCR includes handwriting. Two things are worth holding together: the capability is real and shipping, and handwriting is where extraction errors most easily hide — one reason serious tools keep review steps. PeasyOrders doesn't read handwriting — its span is the text layer, by design.

Some tools transcribe voicemails into draft orders — Choco, Pepper, and Cut+Dry all name voicemail among their capture channels. PeasyOrders doesn't: there's no telephony in it at all — it doesn't record, capture, or transcribe calls or voicemails. What it offers for the phone is one-click manual entry: whoever takes the call types the order once into the same editor as every emailed order, with the same pricing, review, and export.

In parts of the category, yes: Choco digitizes orders from WhatsApp and text, and Pepper and Cut+Dry both capture texts. PeasyOrders doesn't capture SMS or WhatsApp — the channel it captures is email, including the PDF and spreadsheet attachments, and that scope is deliberate: one channel captured completely, reviewed by a person, into QuickBooks Online.

Yes — spreadsheets are among the most reliably parseable order formats, because the structure is already in the file. Pepper's help docs name spreadsheets among what its Order Agent reads, and PeasyOrders parses xlsx and csv attachments alongside the email body and text-layer PDFs, matching rows to your QuickBooks items and applying that customer's pricing.

The current generation of AI order-entry tools reads by meaning rather than by position: it identifies the customer, the line items, and the quantities from the language itself instead of expecting a PO number in a fixed corner. That's why one tool can handle many customers' formats without a template per customer — and the practical difference from older template-based parsing, which breaks when a layout changes. The output is a structured draft, and in serious tools uncertain lines arrive flagged rather than silently guessed.

Extraction gives you what the customer wrote — 'sparkling 500ml, 12' — and matching turns it into your catalog's actual item. In PeasyOrders, lines are matched to your QuickBooks items, loose descriptions included, and anything ambiguous is flagged for the reviewer instead of guessed. Matching is where an order tool earns its keep over a plain parser: a parser stops at the words; matching commits to a SKU.

PeasyOrders learns each customer's shorthand from that account's confirmed order history: after a few confirmed orders, 'the usual' resolves to the right items. It learns from corrections your team confirms — per customer, not from a generic model's guess — so the shorthand map is built from what you actually approved.

In wholesale, an extracted order is only half done until it carries the price this customer actually pays. PeasyOrders holds each customer's pricing with a fixed precedence — an exact customer-and-product price wins over a customer-and-category rule, then the customer's price list, then a blanket discount, then base price — and applies it as the order is structured, with the rule that set each price shown on the line. QuickBooks Online can't do this natively and doesn't expose per-customer pricing to any app, which is why the engine lives in front of QuickBooks.

In a well-built tool, it flags the line instead of guessing. In PeasyOrders, ambiguous lines are flagged and unresolved lines block confirmation — an order can't export with a question mark still on it. The pattern holds at the enterprise end too: Conexiom routes orders that need attention to an exception-review queue rather than pushing them through.

Unit and pack-size ambiguity — a case of 12 versus a case of 24, cases versus eaches — is one of the classic ways wholesale orders go wrong. PeasyOrders flags a quantity or unit it can't resolve rather than converting it silently; there's deliberately no unit-conversion engine making that call. The flag goes to your reviewer, and the line can't be confirmed until a person commits it.

Nothing is created from them. The pattern worth demanding from any tool is suggest-then-validate, and PeasyOrders is strict about it: an email that isn't an order never becomes one by itself, and nothing reaches QuickBooks Online without a person confirming it. Your operator clears the non-orders from the queue and moves on.

In PeasyOrders the draft is held as needing review with the customer unresolved — it can't be confirmed until a person resolves who's ordering. If it's a genuinely new account, the QuickBooks Online Customer is created at export, and only after the operator confirms it. No tool should be creating master records in your books silently.

Because the QuickBooks Online API exposes no sales-order entity — of the documents that can carry an order, estimates and invoices are the ones the API lets software create, whatever plan you're on. The estimate is the natural landing spot because it's non-posting: the exported order sits outside your books until you act on it, and QuickBooks' own conversions take over from there. PeasyOrders exports confirmed orders as an Estimate by default (configurable).

It behaves exactly like an Estimate your team created in QuickBooks Online itself: non-posting, so nothing hits your books until you act on it — typically by converting it to an invoice when it's time to bill. The capture tool's involvement should end at the export, and PeasyOrders' does: it never posts invoices or payments and never writes to your item list.

No. The QuickBooks Online API doesn't expose Price Rules or any per-customer price — the only price it offers a connected app is each item's base price — so a tool claiming to sync your customer pricing from QuickBooks Online has nothing to sync from. The model that works runs the other way: the pricing lives in front of QuickBooks, and the priced order is what lands in your books. PeasyOrders sets this up by reading your past invoices once and proposing each customer's pricing, which you accept, adjust, or discard before it applies.

PeasyOrders doesn't support QuickBooks Desktop — it's built natively on QuickBooks Online. Elsewhere in the category, vendors often name 'QuickBooks' without specifying an edition, so if you're on Desktop, ask any vendor which edition they mean and what the daily workflow looks like. Worth knowing when planning: Intuit no longer sells Desktop to new US subscribers (Enterprise excepted), so the center of gravity for small distributors is QuickBooks Online.

Elsewhere in the category, yes — Pepper names QuickBooks among the 70+ ERPs it has integrated with, and Esker's named connectors are enterprise systems like SAP, Dynamics 365, Oracle, NetSuite, and Sage. PeasyOrders doesn't integrate with Xero, NetSuite, or Sage: its integration is QuickBooks Online, with Google Sheets and CSV as the alternative outputs. If your books aren't on QuickBooks Online, PeasyOrders isn't the right tool — that's the honest answer.

Each answers differently on its own pages. QuickBooks is not among the integrations Conexiom or Esker names — their lists run SAP, Epicor, Dynamics, NetSuite, Sage, and peers — so a definitive answer has to come from those vendors. Choco names QuickBooks among 200+ integrations, and Pepper names QuickBooks among the 70+ ERPs it has integrated with, edition unspecified in both cases. Cut+Dry's marketing has referenced QuickBooks among its integrations, but its own docs group QuickBooks shops with 'non-ERP integrated' partners limited to manual customer-list download and upload.

The enterprise and platform tools don't publish pricing: Conexiom, Esker, Choco, Pepper, and Cut+Dry are all quote- or demo-gated, so every price is a conversation. Document parsers publish theirs — Parseur from $39 per month billed annually, with a free tier — but return extracted fields, not finished orders. PeasyOrders publishes its plans: $99, $199, and $349 per month by confirmed order volume, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

By the vendors' own statements: Choco onboards distributors in as little as two weeks, Pepper's implementations run 35 to 90 days with a dedicated team, and a Cut+Dry homepage case study puts one storefront launch at 90 days from contract; Conexiom and Esker are sales-led, professional-services implementations. Self-serve tools skip the project: PeasyOrders is set up by your own team, and QuickBooks Online connects in about 2 minutes.

Five questions do most of the sorting. Which of my actual order formats do you read — checked against a real week of my orders, not the demo's? What happens when the AI is unsure — a flag and a person, or a guess? Where does the order land — my exact system and edition, and as what document? Is the price published, or does my evaluation include a sales cycle? And what does going live take — a project with your team, or an afternoon with mine?

There's no honest single number: vendors don't publish comparable accuracy figures, and no standard benchmark exists across tools. The category's real answer is architectural — serious tools pair extraction with a review step precisely because extraction is good enough to end the retyping but not good enough to run unwatched. Judge a tool by how visibly it handles uncertainty, not by an accuracy claim.

AI order entry replaces the typing, not the people. Across the category, captured orders arrive as drafts for a person to confirm — Pepper's reps review drafts into the ERP, Cut+Dry requires review-and-submit, and in PeasyOrders you review everything before it touches QuickBooks. What changes is the job: less transcription, more judgment — and your team's account knowledge is exactly what the review step runs on.

In PeasyOrders, every number knows where it came from: each value on the draft traces to its source — hover a line to see the email it came from — and each price shows the rule that set it. Provenance is worth asking any vendor about, because a reviewer can only verify what they can trace back to the original order.