For UK distributors and manufacturers on Dynamics 365 Business Central
Email orders into Business Central as draft sales orders.
Orders that arrive by email, PDF or photo are read, matched to your Business Central customers and items, and created as sales orders with status Open, so nothing reaches the warehouse until someone on your team has checked them. Your order desk spends its time checking and releasing orders.
Or send us one order and see what we’d read and flag, by the end of the next working day.
The problem
Business Central has the order screen. Someone still has to fill it in.
Microsoft’s own guide to creating a sales order in Business Central runs to 14 steps, from searching for Sales Orders to Post and Send. On an order desk most of the time goes on steps three to ten: find the customer, pick the item number for what the customer called it, set the quantity, check the price and the discount. For a 20-line PDF purchase order that is a lot of looking up.
The orders keep coming in by email. Of the distributors in our study of 209 UK supplier websites that offer online ordering, 48% still tell customers to phone, email or give the order to a rep as well. Only 7% of all 209 give an email address just for orders, so most orders queue in the same inbox as every other enquiry (the research note).
How it works
Business Central sales order automation, step by step.
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1
Read
Each order is read as it arrived: the email, an attached PDF or spreadsheet, a photo of a handwritten list. Customer, items, quantities, units, delivery date and the customer’s PO number come out as lines.
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2
Matched and checked
The customer and each item are matched to your records in Business Central. Quantities are checked against inventory and prices against what that customer pays. Anything that doesn’t match is flagged with the reason.
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3
Created as Open
The sales order is created in Business Central with status Open. Your team reads the flags, edits what needs it and releases the order as they would any other.
An order, for example
A facilities firm’s order to a cleaning and hygiene supplies distributor.
Comes in
Hi, order attached for the Harrogate site, PO 20931. Can you deliver Tuesday? Also 6 more of the anti-slip mats, same as before. Thanks, Lucy, Wexley Facilities
Checked
- Customer matched: Wexley Facilities, Harrogate delivery address
- 18 lines read from the spreadsheet, item numbers matched
- “Anti-slip mats” matched to the item on her last order
- PO 20931 not seen before, so not a repeat
- Blue roll, 2-ply: 4 in inventory, 10 ordered
Waits for your approval
Sales order · Open · 19 lines · 1 short
In Business Central with PO 20931 as the external document number. Waiting for your team to check and release.
Illustration with invented data. More on sales order processing automation, and on emailing orders into other ERPs.
Connecting to Business Central
How we would connect to Business Central order management.
Based on Microsoft’s own documentation for Business Central, checked in October 2026.
- The route in
- Business Central’s API (v2.0), a standard REST API. Its salesOrder resource can create, read, update and delete sales orders, with their lines.
- Customer’s PO number
- Goes on the sales order as the external document number, a field the API has.
- Items and stock
- Read through the same API. Each item record carries a unit price and how many units are in inventory.
- Status
- A new sales order is Open by default. Microsoft’s documentation says the warehouse won’t begin to prepare the shipment while an order is Open. Releasing it is the signal, and that is where your team’s approval sits.
- Sales quotes
- Business Central has sales quotes too, and its API can turn a quote into an order. If you quote before you sell, the draft can be a sales quote instead. See quote automation.
- Online or on-premises
- The APIs are switched on by default in Business Central online. On-premises installations need them enabled first.
What it costs you today
Work out the hours before anything else.
The cost is keying time, plus the cost of fixing orders that went out wrong. Illustration with invented data: 120 orders a day at 4 minutes each is 40 hours a week of keying, just over one full-time person. Credits and re-deliveries come on top.
Put your own figures into the order desk calculator. It shows the hours and the pounds a year, and it doesn’t guess at savings. If we work together, that figure is the baseline we report against.
What you get from us
In this order, with a fixed price before you commit.
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30 minutes
Call with you
Where orders pile up, and which number that holds back.
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1 hour
Session with your order desk
We watch real orders go into Business Central. The same day you get a one-page verdict: the workflow, the KPI it moves, today’s baseline and a fixed price. Or a written no.
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A fixed number of weeks
Build
We build it and connect it to your Business Central. Nothing is subcontracted.
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Every month
Run and report
We run it and report order processing time and order errors against the baseline. Stop at any report.
Questions
What people ask about Business Central order automation.
- Can Business Central create sales orders through an API?
- Yes. Business Central’s API (v2.0) can create sales orders and their lines, and sales quotes too. It is on by default in Business Central online and has to be enabled on-premises.
- Doesn’t Business Central have its own agent for email orders?
- Microsoft has added a Sales Order Agent. It watches a mailbox, checks the customer and item availability, and creates a sales quote that your team reviews and turns into an order. If it fits how your orders arrive, use it, and we’ll say so in the session. We build around your order desk’s own rules and report its numbers every month.
- Will orders reach the warehouse before anyone checks them?
- No. Orders go in with status Open and stay that way until someone on your team releases them.
- Do our customers have to change how they order?
- No. They keep emailing, attaching PDFs and spreadsheets, or sending photos to the address they use now.
- What does it cost?
- The price is fixed and written on the one-page verdict after the session with your team, before you commit to anything. If we don’t find anything worth doing, we’ll tell you and leave.
Next step
Thirty minutes on your Business Central order desk.
Tell us how orders reach you and roughly how many come in a day. Or send us one order first and see what we’d read and flag.
The Open Build. We’ll build one UK supplier an order desk system, free and in public, measured on its own numbers. Everyone who applies gets a one-page read of their own workflow. Applications close at 5pm UK time on Friday 6 November. See the Open Build.