For distributors and manufacturers
Nobody should be typing an order that already arrived.
Your customers send purchase orders as PDFs, email bodies, scanned faxes and photographs of paper. Never Retype reads them and enters them into your order system. A person approves. Nobody keys.
Read-only on your mailbox. Orders arrive as drafts, never posted straight through.
Every customer sends a different shape. These are the ones already learned.
The whole product
One of these is work.
The other one is the job done.
Nothing about how your customers send orders has to change. That is the entire point — they were never going to change it anyway.
What arrives
Their part numbers. Their layout. Somebody has to read it.
What gets entered
PO 44831 · Northfield Mechanical
| Their code | Your SKU | Description | Qty |
|---|---|---|---|
| BRS-3/4-90EL | EL9034-BR | Brass elbow 90°, 3/4" | 48 |
| 1/2 CU TYPE-L | CU12L-10 | Copper tube type L, 1/2" | 120 |
| PTFE TAPE .5 | TP50-PTFE | PTFE thread seal tape | 36 |
| BALLV-1IN-FP | BV100-FP | Ball valve 1", full port | 12 |
One line flagged: two SKUs match BALLV-1IN-FP. Never Retype will not guess between them — a person picks, once, and it remembers.
What it costs today
Two hundred and
fifty hours.
Every month. A distributor taking four thousand orders, three quarters of them arriving as documents somebody has to read — roughly one and a half people whose whole job is retyping what a customer already wrote down.
250
hours keying, every month
$145,200
a year, labour and mistakes
30
orders a month go out wrong
The order desk
Reads it, types it, and owns the mistake.
Customer service
Takes the call when the wrong thing turns up.
The warehouse
Picks exactly what the screen says, correct or not.
The sales rep
Finds out at the account review, months later.
Accounts receivable
Chases an invoice the customer is disputing.
The customer
Remembers it for a long time, and mentions it at renewal.
One mis-keyed line touches all six of them before it is finished.
How it works
Six steps, and a person
still owns the last word.
Nothing posts to your order system on its own. Ever.
- 01
Connect the mailbox and the order system
Read-only on the mailbox. It can see what arrives; it cannot send, delete or reply.
- 02
Every order lands in one queue
Attachments, email bodies, scanned faxes, photographs of paper. Including the customer who still sends a fax, because there is always one.
- 03
The software reads it
Customer, purchase-order number, every line, quantities, part numbers, the date they want it. The parts a person would read.
- 04
It matches to your catalogue
Their part number becomes your SKU — including the ones they get wrong, and the ones they have been getting wrong for years.
- 05
A person approves
Orders arrive as drafts, never posted straight through. Anything the software is unsure of is flagged rather than guessed.
- 06
It learns each customer's format
The first order from a customer needs a look. The hundredth needs nothing at all.
What you'd look at
A queue, not
an inbox.
One place where everything that arrived overnight is already read, matched and drafted — with the handful that need a human clearly marked.
This morning
41 orders in
| Northfield Mechanical | 44831 | 4 lines | Drafted | |
| Trellis Industrial | TR-99204 | 11 lines | Drafted | |
| Fax | Halstead Pipe | 8871 | 6 lines | Needs a look |
| Photo | Cobalt Fasteners | CF-0455 | 2 lines | Drafted |
| Bayline Distribution | BD-71180 | 18 lines | Drafted |
Catalogue matching
1 to ask about
Three ways the same customer writes the same elbow. All three now land on one SKU.
Hours not spent keying
250 hrs / month
It climbs. Each customer’s format is learned once and never has to be learned again.
Designs, not screenshots — the product is not built yet.
From the order desk
The people who
used to do the typing.
Distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers who stopped keying orders by hand.
Find out what the typing is costing you.
Four numbers off your own order desk and you will have a figure. It is usually larger than people expect, and it is almost never the salary that makes it large.