For manufacturing distributors
Emailed purchase orders in.ERP-ready sales orders out.
Durathink Purchase Order Agent extracts customer PO data, maps line items, validates order details, and prepares clean sales orders for review and ERP integration.
Nothing reaches your ERP until a person approves it.
Northside Electric · Received 7:42 AM
Sales order · Draft
Acct 4471 · Br 02
- 500' THHN #12 BLK STRD→ WIR-THHN-12-BLK-500In stock
- (12) SQD QO120→ BRK-QO120In stock
- 1/2" EMT 10' STICK x40→ CON-EMT-050-10In stock
- 4sq box w/ ko, deep→ 2 possible matchesReview
3 of 4 lines matched
Needs your review
- Built for
- Electrical, HVAC, fastener, industrial supply, and building-material distribution.
- ERP integration
- Structured, import-ready output — through file export, API, or a custom connector.
- Who you'll talk to
- The founder, on every call. No sales team.
The cost
What manual order entry actually costs
One purchase order, start to finish, on a normal Tuesday. The clock is the part nobody measures.
- 0:00Email arrives
- 0:40Open the PDF
- 4:20Retype the lines
- 6:10Search each SKU
- 7:30Check stock
- 8:45Create the order
- 9:20Catch the mistakes
Marked steps are where errors enter.
Run your own numbers
That's 14 hours a week your team spends typing — $19,656 a year in order-entry labour.
Assumes the agent handles first-pass entry and your team still reviews every order. At 75% that's 10 hours a week and $14,742 a year back.
How it works
Six steps, and you only touch the last two
- 01
Email or PDF arrives
Forward to a dedicated address, or connect the mailbox your customers already send to. Nothing changes on their end.
- 02
Purchase-order extraction
Header, ship-to, bill-to, dates, and every line item pulled from the document. Each field links back to where it appeared on the page.
- 03
Customer and SKU mapping
The customer account is identified, and customer part numbers, shorthand, and description-only lines are resolved against your catalog.
- 04
Validation
Quantities, unit of measure, pricing, and totals checked against what your system expects — before anyone looks at the order.
- 05
Exception review
Only the lines the agent isn't sure about need your attention. Approve, correct, or reject them line by line.
- 06
ERP-ready sales order
A validated, import-ready sales order lands with your team. They approve it and bring it in. Your ERP stays yours.
Northside Electric · Received 7:42 AM
Sales order · Draft
Acct 4471 · Br 02
- 500' THHN #12 BLK STRD→ WIR-THHN-12-BLK-500In stock
- (12) SQD QO120→ BRK-QO120In stock
- 1/2" EMT 10' STICK x40→ CON-EMT-050-10In stock
- 4sq box w/ ko, deep→ 2 possible matchesReview
- BOX-4SQ-2125-KO4" square box, 2-1/8" deep, 1/2"–3/4" KO61%
- BOX-4SQ-1500-KO4" square box, 1-1/2" deep, 1/2"–3/4" KO34%
3 of 4 lines matched
Needs your review
Control
It stops where you decide it stops
The useful question isn't whether software can read a purchase order. It's what happens on the line it can't read. The agent flags that line and waits.
Northside Electric · Received 7:42 AM
Sales order · Draft
Acct 4471 · Br 02
- 500' THHN #12 BLK STRD→ WIR-THHN-12-BLK-500In stock
- (12) SQD QO120→ BRK-QO120In stock
- 1/2" EMT 10' STICK x40→ CON-EMT-050-10In stock
- 4sq box w/ ko, deep→ 2 possible matchesReview
- BOX-4SQ-2125-KO4" square box, 2-1/8" deep, 1/2"–3/4" KO61%
- BOX-4SQ-1500-KO4" square box, 1-1/2" deep, 1/2"–3/4" KO34%
- ApproveCorrect
3 of 4 lines matched
Awaiting approval
- AI proposes, rules validate
- Extraction is a proposal. Business rules and your own data decide whether a line passes — not the model's confidence alone.
- Only exceptions surface
- Clean lines stay out of your way. Your team looks at the handful that need judgment, not all forty.
- Every field is traceable
- Click any value to see the exact region of the source document it came from. Checking a line takes seconds, not a re-read.
- Nothing is invented
- The agent only returns what appears on the document. Where a value is missing, the field stays empty and gets flagged — it is never filled in from context.
- Decisions are logged
- Who approved what, when, and what changed, recorded against the order it belongs to.
- Approval-gated by design
- The agent produces a file your team imports. It holds no credentials to your ERP and cannot post an order on its own.
Capabilities
Built around one job, done completely
Email and PDF intake
Multi-page POs, scans, faxes, and orders pasted into the email body with no attachment.
Structured field extraction
Customer, ship-to, bill-to, dates, references, and line items pulled into structured data.
Customer SKU mapping
Customer part numbers, shorthand, and description-only lines matched against your catalog.
Quantity and UOM validation
Units of measure normalised and quantities checked against how you actually sell the item.
Price and total verificationDesign partner
Line prices and order totals compared to what your system expects for that customer.
Duplicate-order detectionIn development
The same PO emailed twice, or a revision of one already processed, flagged before it becomes two orders.
Exception review queue
Flagged lines only, with ranked alternatives and the source document beside them.
ERP-ready output
Validated order data as a structured, import-ready file.
Operational audit trail
Every extraction, correction, and approval recorded against the order it belongs to.
Where it fits
Built for distribution, designed to fit your stack
Industries
Built for distributors whose customers send orders as documents rather than through EDI.
- Electrical distributors
- HVAC distributors
- Fastener distributors
- Industrial supply distributors
- Building-material distributors
- Manufacturing component distributors
The markets the agent is designed for — not a customer list.
Integration
Designed to integrate with ERP and order-management workflows. The right mechanism depends on your environment, and we work it out with each design partner.
- Structured export in your import format
- ERP integration through APIs
- Secure file transfer
- Custom connectors
- Design-partner integrations built with you
No certified vendor integrations are claimed. Bring your ERP and import spec to the call.
Demo
See it on a real purchase order
Northside Electric · Received 7:42 AM
Sales order · Draft
Acct 4471 · Br 02
- 500' THHN #12 BLK STRDp.1 · line 1→ WIR-THHN-12-BLK-500In stock
- (12) SQD QO120p.1 · line 2→ BRK-QO120In stock
- 1/2" EMT 10' STICK x40p.1 · line 3→ CON-EMT-050-10In stock
- 4sq box w/ ko, deepp.1 · line 4→ 2 possible matchesReview
3 of 4 lines matched
Needs your review
Walkthrough — coming shortly
We'd rather show you your own POs than a canned recording. Bring three of your messiest ones to the call and we'll run them live.
Domain
Built for how your counter actually works
Generic document AI breaks on the things that make a distributor's POs a distributor's POs. These are the cases we built for first — the examples are electrical, and the same patterns appear across every vertical above.
- Customer part numbers that have never matched your catalog
- Lines with a description and no part number at all
- Unit-of-measure mismatches — M, C, and EA on the same wire order
- Cut lengths and reel quantities that don't divide cleanly
- Multi-branch ship-to on a single purchase order
- Job names and release numbers that have to survive to the order
- Will-call versus delivery, marked anywhere on the page
- Tax-exempt jobs with the certificate referenced, not attached
- The same PO emailed twice, an hour apart, slightly revised
- Scanned and faxed orders that arrive as flat images
- Orders typed into the email body with no attachment
- Revisions that reference the original PO number and nothing else
Security
Engineered for documents you don't own
Your customers' purchase orders are their commercial data as much as yours. These are the principles the product is built on.
- Encryption in transit and at rest
- Role-based access to orders and documents
- Audit logging of extractions, corrections, and approvals
- Customer-data isolation between accounts
- Configurable retention and deletion
- Restricted human access, limited to supporting your account
No compliance certification is claimed. Security and deployment requirements are reviewed with each design partner.
Read the security overviewDesign partners
We're taking on a small number of distributors
Not a pilot programme with a sales process attached. Work directly with Durathink to adapt the Purchase Order Agent to your order-entry workflow, document formats, product catalog, and ERP environment.
What you get
- Free for the first 30 days
- A direct line to the founder — not a ticket queue
- Your workflow shapes what gets built next
- Catalog mapping and onboarding done for you
- Design-partner pricing, kept, if you continue
What we ask
- Around 30 recent purchase orders to calibrate against
- An hour with whoever does order entry today
- Honest feedback, including when it's wrong
- A reference conversation, only if it works
We're onboarding 5 distributors this quarter.
Questions
What operations managers ask first
What happens when a PO has a part number we've never seen?
It gets flagged, not guessed. The agent shows the line exactly as the customer wrote it, ranks the closest matches from your catalog, and waits for a person. Once you pick one, that mapping is remembered for that customer — the same line resolves on its own next time.
Does this change anything in our ERP automatically?
No. The agent hands your team a validated, import-ready sales order; your team reviews it and brings it in. It holds no credentials to your ERP and cannot post an order on its own.
Which ERPs does this work with?
The agent produces structured, import-ready order data. Whether that reaches your ERP as a file import, through an API, or via a custom connector depends on your environment, and it is something we build with each design partner rather than something we ship pre-certified. Bring your ERP and its import spec to the call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's a fit.
What about scanned POs, faxes, and orders pasted into the email body?
All three are handled. Scans and faxes go through character recognition before extraction, and body-of-email orders are read straight from the message. Accuracy tracks the quality of the source, and anything low-confidence is flagged rather than guessed.
How does it handle contract pricing and customer-specific pricing?
The agent reads the price the customer put on the PO and compares it to the price your system expects for that customer. When they disagree, the line is flagged with both numbers side by side. It doesn't decide which one is right — that's a judgment call with margin attached, and it stays with your team. Price validation is configured per design partner, since it depends on your pricing data.
Who can see our customers' purchase orders? Do you train models on our data?
Access is limited to the people supporting your account, and documents can be deleted on request. Data handling, retention, and model-provider arrangements are agreed in writing with each design partner before any documents are processed — we'd rather put that in your contract than make a blanket claim on a web page.
What happens when it gets something wrong?
You catch it in review, because every order stops there before it reaches your ERP. Each extracted field links back to the region of the source document it came from, so verifying a line takes seconds. Corrections feed the mapping for that customer, so the same mistake doesn't recur.
Does this replace my order entry team?
No — it removes the typing. The people who know your customers and catch the problems are the reason this works at all. The agent hands them a validated draft instead of a blank screen, so the same team absorbs more volume and spends its attention on the exceptions instead of the keyboard.
How long does onboarding take, and what do we need to provide?
About a week. We need a catalog export, roughly 30 recent purchase orders to calibrate against, and an hour with whoever does order entry today. We do the mapping work.
What happens after the 30 days?
You decide whether to continue and we agree pricing then, at design-partner rates you keep. If it isn't working, we part company and you keep the catalog mapping we built.
Do our customers have to change how they send us orders?
No. That's the point. They keep emailing purchase orders exactly as they do today.
Next step
See it run on your own POs
Bring three of your messiest purchase orders. We'll run them live on the call and you'll know inside twenty minutes whether this is worth your time.