Multi-channel order intake unification. Inbound email orders into one validated ERP-ready queue.
The distributor takes contractor and trade-customer orders through five channels every day: phone calls to the counter, emails to a shared inbox, faxes from old-school accounts, online portal orders that export as CSV, and paper or text orders from outside sales reps. Email goes one by one. Each gets re-keyed into the ERP. The order-entry team is the throughput cap on volume.
It starts when an email order lands in the shared inbox.
A contractor emails the counter: eight line items, two of them written as the customer's own part numbers, a note to bill the Westside job. Right now a clerk reads that email, looks the account up in the ERP, translates each SKU by hand, keys in the contracted price line by line, and double-checks the ship-to before it saves. Multiply that by the inbox that fills all morning, and the email channel alone backs up for hours. The order does not move until a person re-types it, and the order-entry desk is the ceiling on how much the branch can take in a day.
From shared-inbox email to a sales order in your ERP, hands off the keyboard.
- 01
We wire email parsing to your customer + pricing data
Pilot weeks 1 to 2: we wire inbound email parsing against your customer master and contracted-pricing rules. The first channel goes from "re-key by hand" to "review and approve."
- 02
Email orders land in one validated queue
Each parsed email becomes a draft order: customer matched, contracted pricing applied. The clerk works one queue instead of an inbox.
- 03
Exception flagging for human review
New SKUs, ambiguous customer matches, credit holds, and unusual quantities flag for clerk attention. The routine 80 percent goes through clean.
- 04
Clerk approves, order writes to your ERP
Clerk reviews and approves. Order writes into your existing ERP as a standard sales order. By day 30, email-order entry time per order drops and re-key errors decrease.
30-day proof.
The pilot delivers one thing: inbound email orders converted into validated, ERP-ready entries in one review queue, with customer and contracted pricing matched automatically. The first 2 to 3 weeks, we wire the email parsing against your customer master and pricing rules. By day 30, email orders that used to sit for hours waiting for re-keying get processed same-day, and re-key errors on the email channel measurably decrease.
From there it grows. On the monthly, the next tool adds fax OCR for old-school accounts. The one after layers in portal CSV imports. The one after adds phone-call note ingestion. The one after pulls in outside-rep order forms via mobile or paper-scan. The one after layers in inventory checks at intake time and reorder triggers on watched SKUs. Eventually the destination is the full unified inbound-order queue.
Your monthly is flat once the pilot graduates onto Starter. Small refinements stay included. Adding fax OCR, portal CSV, phone notes, rep forms, or inventory checks is each a new tool, and we tell you about each one openly before we build it. The order-entry team's capacity grows channel by channel without adding headcount.
$800 pilot: inbound email orders converted to validated ERP-ready queue entries with customer + pricing matched. 2 to 3 weeks to build, 30 days live. After the pilot, the engagement graduates onto Starter ($295/mo). The tool grows from there as fax, portal, phone, and rep channels layer in.
The distributors whose email orders are deep enough to template.
This fits small and mid-sized distributors and wholesalers receiving orders through 3 or more channels (phone, email, fax, portal, outside-rep tickets). Typical fit: 25 to 100 person distributors with $5M to $50M revenue, where inside-sales spends 40 percent or more of their time on order entry. Also fits hardware-plumbing-heating distributors, machinery wholesalers, motor-vehicle-parts distributors, metals-and-minerals wholesalers, and food-and-beverage wholesalers. It works when your email-order traffic is high enough to template. It does not fit distributors whose primary channel is in-person counter sales with no remote-order traffic.
Why custom, not off-the-shelf.
A 30-person distributor taking orders from email, EDI, a customer portal, and the phone does not need to swap its inventory system. It needs an intake layer that normalizes every channel into the ERP it already runs. Edge cases like customer-specific SKUs, custom pricing, and drop-ship instructions are preserved, not flattened.
The off-the-shelf options for this workflow
- Full inventory-and-order-management platforms$325 to $1,000-plus per month. Replace your inventory system. Complex pricing per channel, per SKU class, and per integration adds up fast.
- E-commerce multi-channel platformsBuilt for sellers on consumer marketplaces. B2B distributor flows (EDI 850s, customer portals, phone orders, dealer pricing) are weak or absent.
- Enterprise SKU-mapping platformsBuilt for $50M-plus companies onboarding many marketplaces at once. Wrong scale for a 30-person distributor unifying four or five channels.
When the off-the-shelf option is the right call
A full inventory-and-order-management platform makes sense if you are building a multi-channel business from scratch and want one platform for everything. ByteQuix fits the distributor whose ERP works fine but whose order intake is the bottleneck.
It reads against the customer master and price book your ERP already holds.
The pilot wires inbound email parsing against your ERP's customer master and contracted-pricing rules (Epicor Eclipse, Prophet 21, Acumatica, Infor SX.e, Sage 300, NetSuite). Validated email orders push back as standard sales orders. No fax, no portal CSV, no phone notes, no outside-rep forms, no inventory checks in the pilot. As the tool grows on the monthly, each additional channel and capability layers in one tool at a time.
See it in motion ↓Follow one email order through the queue.
What order-entry teams ask before handing the email channel over.
By day 30, what gets pulled off the order desk's keyboard?
The email channel. Inbound orders to your shared inbox get parsed against your customer master and contracted-pricing rules, landed in one validated review queue, and written to your ERP as standard sales orders when the clerk approves. Build is 2 to 3 weeks, then 30 days live against a metric we set first: email-order entry time per order and re-key errors on that channel, both measured against your starting baseline. Fax OCR, portal CSV, phone-call notes, outside-rep forms, and intake-time inventory checks are not in the pilot; each layers in later as its own tool. $800 is your only upfront commitment, and after the 30 days the engagement graduates onto Starter at $295 a month to keep the queue running and maintained.
What if our customers send orders in unstructured email formats?
Most do. Email parsing handles unstructured email through pattern recognition trained on your customers' actual email history. The first 4 to 6 weeks calibrate against your real traffic; after that, accuracy is usually 90 percent or better on routine orders.
How do you handle customer-specific SKUs that differ from ours?
Each customer can have their own SKU map maintained in the tool. When their internal part number arrives, the queue translates to your SKU before the order hits the ERP. Stops the inside-sales SKU-translation work that was eating hours.
Once email is handled, does adding the fax or portal channel cost extra?
Your monthly is flat, and tuning the email queue while it runs (new pricing rules, customer SKU maps, exception thresholds) stays included. Bringing on the next channel is a different thing: fax OCR, portal CSV imports, phone-call note ingestion, outside-rep order forms, and intake-time inventory checks are each a new tool, and we quote each one openly before we build it, so capacity grows channel by channel with no surprise line items. Most distributors stay at their starting tier for a while, and that is fine with us.
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