Do customers need to change how they send orders?

No. They keep emailing their purchase orders; you forward them, or set an auto-forward rule, to your orders address.

What happens when a purchase order has no prices?

Many purchase orders leave prices to the agreement. Lines that name an item on the customer's price list can take the list price; anything else is flagged for a person to price.

How are duplicate orders avoided?

Each file is fingerprinted when it arrives, so the same PDF forwarded twice is flagged, and a PO number already used for that customer is flagged before posting.

How to automate sales order entry from email into QuickBooks Online

6 min readUpdated September 29, 2026By the thruflow team

The short answer

To automate sales order entry, send every customer purchase order to one email address, have software read the customer, PO number, items, quantities and prices from the PDF or email, check each line against the customer's agreed prices, have a person confirm anything uncertain, then create the invoice in QuickBooks Online with each line mapped to the right product. The typing goes away; the checking stays.

Why order entry is still done by hand

Customers send purchase orders in their own format: a PDF from their ERP, an export from a buying portal, a scan, a photo of a printed page, or a few lines typed into an email. Because no two look alike, someone usually retypes each one into the order or invoicing system.

Retyping is slow, and the mistakes it causes are expensive later: a wrong SKU ships the wrong goods, a wrong price becomes a pricing deduction, and a missing PO number can get an invoice rejected by the customer's accounts payable team.

The five steps of automated order entry

One address for orders. Customers keep emailing as they do today; you forward their orders, or set an auto-forward rule, to a single order address.
Read. Text PDFs are read directly, scans and photos go through OCR, and the hardest pages can go to an AI model. Every value should be tied to the place on the page it came from.
Match. The customer is matched by name or email address, items by SKU, and each price against the customer's price list, including quantity breaks and promotions.
Check. Anything the reader isn't sure of, or any price that differs from the list, is flagged for a person. A second person approves the order before it's invoiced.
Post. The invoice is created in QuickBooks Online with each line on the right product or service, the customer's PO number on the invoice, and the original PDF kept with the record.

What to check on every order

The customer, the bill-to and the ship-to address.
The customer's PO number: many retailers and distributors reject invoices without it.
Each SKU and its unit of measure (a dozen is not a piece).
Quantities, and requested ship or delivery dates.
Prices against what you agreed, not just against last time.
Freight and other charges, and whether they're taxable where the order ships.
Duplicates: the same PO forwarded twice, or a revised PO replacing an earlier one.

What to look for in a tool

It reads the formats your customers actually send, including scans and orders typed into the email.
It shows where each value was read, so checking takes a glance instead of retyping.
It learns each customer's layout from your corrections.
It checks prices against each customer's price list, not only that a price exists.
Someone approves the order before anything reaches QuickBooks.
You can see and change which QuickBooks product each line posts to before it posts.
A retried post can never create a duplicate invoice or a duplicate customer.

How thruflow does it

thruflow gives each organization its own orders address. Orders are read into sales orders with every value pinned to the page, lines without a price take the customer's list price, prices that differ from the list are flagged, and a second person approves before the invoice posts to QuickBooks Online on the products you choose.

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Questions

Do customers need to change how they send orders?: No. They keep emailing their purchase orders; you forward them, or set an auto-forward rule, to your orders address.
What happens when a purchase order has no prices?: Many purchase orders leave prices to the agreement. Lines that name an item on the customer's price list can take the list price; anything else is flagged for a person to price.
How are duplicate orders avoided?: Each file is fingerprinted when it arrives, so the same PDF forwarded twice is flagged, and a PO number already used for that customer is flagged before posting.