For UK distributors and manufacturers on Sage 200
Sage 200 order entry from email, checked and waiting for your approval.
Orders that arrive by email, PDF or photo are read, checked against the prices and stock already in Sage 200, and held as a draft until someone on your team approves them. Then the sales order is created through the Sage 200 API, and nobody keys it twice.
Or send us one order and see what we’d read and flag, by the end of the next working day.
The problem
Customers order in their own words. Sage 200 wants an account, stock codes and a price band.
An email lands at 07:40 asking for “the usual plus two boxes of the 22mm elbows”. Someone opens Sage 200, finds the customer, works out which stock item “22mm elbows” means, checks the price and keys the lines into a new sales order. Then the next one. A PDF purchase order from a bigger customer is easier to read and just as slow to key.
Online ordering hasn’t taken this work away. 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, and 12% of all the suppliers still list a fax number (the research note). Those figures are what the websites say, not counts of orders. Every one of those routes ends with someone at a keyboard.
How it works
How we automate Sage 200 orders from the inbox, step by step.
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1
Read
Each order is read where it arrives: the email itself, an attached PDF or spreadsheet, a photo of a handwritten sheet. Customer, products, quantities, units and delivery date come out as order lines.
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2
Checked against Sage 200
Each line is matched to your stock items and checked against the customer’s price band and discounts, and against stock in the warehouse it ships from. Anything that doesn’t match is flagged with the reason.
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3
Approved, then entered
Your order clerk sees the draft next to the original email, changes what needs changing and approves it. Only then is the sales order created in Sage 200.
An order, for example
A heating engineer’s purchase order to a plumbing and heating distributor.
Comes in
Morning, PO 4471 attached. Can you add 2 boxes of the 22mm copper elbows, same as last time. Need it all Thursday please. Ian, Dene Heating
Checked
- Customer matched: Dene Heating, account DEN001
- PO 4471: 12 lines read from the PDF
- “22mm copper elbows” matched to the item on his last order, box of 10
- Prices match Dene Heating’s price band
- 15mm compression tees: 1 box in the Leeds warehouse, 3 ordered
Waits for your approval
Draft sales order · 13 lines · 1 short
Goes into Sage 200 once approved. Your team decides whether the short line goes on back order or is swapped.
Illustration with invented data. More on sales order processing automation, and on emailing orders into other ERPs.
Connecting to Sage 200
How we would connect to Sage 200 sales order processing.
Based on Sage’s own documentation for Sage 200, checked in October 2026.
- The route in
- The Sage 200 API, which Sage publishes for Sage 200 Standard and Sage 200 Professional. Its sales order endpoints cover creating orders and their lines.
- Prices
- Read from Sage 200’s Price Book, which holds price bands, customer discount groups and order value discounts.
- Stock
- Read from Sage 200’s stock records by warehouse, so a short line is flagged before anyone approves the order.
- After it goes in
- Sage 200’s own order statuses still apply: Live, On hold and Completed. An order for a customer over their credit limit can still go on hold, as it does today.
- Quotations
- Sage 200 quotations convert to sales orders. If you quote before you sell, quote requests can be read and checked the same way. See quote automation.
- Before we start
- The Sage 200 API needs setting up before anything can connect, and it relies on Microsoft 365. Sage suggests your Sage 200 business partner does the setup. We would work alongside them.
What it costs you today
Count the minutes at the order desk first.
The cost is the time spent keying, plus the cost of putting wrong orders right. Illustration with invented data: a desk keying 80 orders a day at 5 minutes each spends 33 hours a week on it. That is close to one full-time person before a single wrong line is credited and re-delivered.
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
Which orders take longest to key, and which number that holds back.
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1 hour
Session with your order desk
We watch real orders go into Sage 200. 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 Sage 200. 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 Sage 200 order entry.
- Does Sage 200 have an API we can use for order entry?
- Yes. Sage publishes the Sage 200 API for Sage 200 Standard and Professional, and its sales order endpoints cover creating orders and order lines. It needs setting up first, usually by your Sage 200 business partner.
- Will orders go into Sage 200 without anyone checking them?
- No. Every order waits as a draft until someone on your team approves it. The draft shows what was read, what matched and what didn’t, next to the customer’s original email.
- What if a customer writes “the usual” or uses their own product names?
- Many orders do. “The usual” is filled in from the customer’s order history, and their names for products are matched to your stock items. Anything uncertain is flagged for your team to confirm.
- Do our customers have to change how they order?
- No. They keep emailing, attaching PDFs 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 Sage 200 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.