Emailed orders into Sage 50,
without the retyping.
Reads the orders your customers email you, checks every line against your customer and price records, and posts them into Sage as real sales orders. Nothing posts without your approval.
The reading and checking on every order is work a system can do. What's left for a person is the part that needs judgment: approving it, or catching what's wrong.
Status
Working end to end against a Sage 50 trial install of my own. Orders post and I verify them.
The problem
Sage 50 Accounts gives you no way to import a sales order yourself. So when a customer emails one, somebody retypes every line by hand. Wholesalers have been asking for a fix on Sage's own forums and the UK accounting forums for over a decade.
Fit
Wholesalers and distributors of roughly 5 to 49 staff, on Sage 50 Accounts, taking around 250 or more orders a month by email. I'm looking for my first two or three to run it with.
Stack
n8n, Postgres, and Claude, plus an approval app I built.
Watch it run, two and a half minutes.
Over a decade of asking.
"We receive numerous purchase orders daily as PDF attachments via email. Staff manually enter each sales order into Sage 50. Is there any software compatible with Sage that can automate the process?"
Asked on the Sage and UK accounting forums since 2012. Every tool recommended in reply solves the same half of it: getting a clean, structured file into Sage. When the order arrives as an email, the advice is to ask your customers to send a spreadsheet. Which still needs a tool to get it in.
Your customers won't change how they order. So this system reads what they already send.
From inbox to Sage, four steps.
An order arrives by email
In the email body, or attached as a PDF, Excel, or Word file. The system picks it up and pulls out the text. No portal, no form, nothing for your customers to learn.
AI reads the order
One call to Claude turns the message into structured order lines, ready for checking. That is the only AI in the whole system. If it can't read something, that order goes in front of a person, never quietly dropped.
Checked against your own records
First, who is this? The customer is matched against your own customer list, and if the match isn't certain, a person is asked to confirm. Then every product line is checked against your price list. Anything unsure gets a flag, not a guess.
You approve, and it confirms
Approved orders go into Sage as real sales orders. The system then reads Sage back and confirms each one landed, with the sales order number Sage gave it. An order Sage refuses gets flagged, not lost.
What it does. What it deliberately doesn't.
What it does
- · Shows you the customer's original next to what was read from it, with each line highlighted where it was found.
- · Says so when it can't place a line, instead of filling the gap with a guess.
- · Learns what your customers call things. Someone picks the right product once and ticks remember, and that phrase finds the right line from then on.
- · Stops on an impossible quantity or line value. Sage will quietly accept a negative quantity and save an order worth £0.00, so the system sets limits Sage doesn't. Posting one anyway is an explicit, logged choice.
- · Confirms every order landed in Sage, with the number Sage gave it.
What it deliberately doesn't
- · It never posts an order on its own. A wrong order in Sage becomes a wrong pick, a wrong delivery, and a credit note. That is worth one click.
- · It doesn't replace the person doing your order entry. They still handle the phone orders, the exceptions, the customer who wants something changing. It takes the typing off them, not the job.
- · It doesn't read scans or photographs. Reading text off an image gets characters wrong, and a wrong stock code means the wrong product goes out. Those go to a person instead.
- · It doesn't touch your customer's PO field. In wholesale that field prints on the despatch note and the invoice, and some customers won't pay without it. It stays theirs.
The screen your order clerk actually uses.
I started with Sage 50 because emailed orders are a common manual bottleneck there.
The same read, check, approve process can connect to other systems too. Tell me what you run and I'll give you a straight answer.
Still retyping emailed orders into Sage 50?
Tell me how orders reach you today and I'll be honest about whether this is worth it for your volume. A 30-day pilot starts at £1,200.