Harrowell

For UK distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers of 50 to 500 people

Sales order processor job description (UK), and what to automate before you hire

A sales order processor takes customer orders by email, phone, portal and rep, enters them correctly before the cut-off and tells each customer what is coming. Below is a job description to copy, then a two-week check of how much of the job is keying.

Book thirty minutes

Or send us one order and see the draft it would become.

Before you write it

Most desks hire when the inbox runs late. Check what is in the inbox first.

The usual trigger is a desk that can't clear the morning's orders before the cut-off, or someone leaving. If the extra hours are phone calls, problems and customers who need a person, hire.

Keying is a different kind of hour: reading an email, finding the account and the products, typing the lines. Of the 108 UK distributors and wholesalers whose websites we read, 48% of those with online ordering still tell customers to phone, email or use a rep as well (our research note). Each of those routes ends with someone typing. The check follows the template.

The template

Sales order processor: job description.

Copy it and change the parts in square brackets. The same job is advertised as sales order administrator, order processor and order entry clerk.

Job title
Sales order processor
Reports to
[Customer service manager or sales office manager]
Hours
[37.5] hours a week, Monday to Friday, [8am to 4.30pm]
Location
[Site], office based
Pay
[Your figure]. ONS pay data is below.
Purpose
Every customer order entered correctly and in time for [the 3pm cut-off], and every customer told what is coming and when.
Responsibilities
  • Enter sales orders received by email, PDF, phone, the web portal and from reps into [your ERP], accurately and before the cut-off.
  • Match customers' own product codes and descriptions to ours, and check quantities and units.
  • Check each order against the customer's agreed prices, our stock and their credit status, and refer differences to [the sales manager].
  • Send order confirmations, and tell customers about shortages, substitutions and delivery dates.
  • Answer calls and emails about orders, deliveries and returns, and raise credit requests under [our returns policy].
  • Work with the warehouse on stock, picking and deliveries.
  • Keep customer accounts, delivery addresses and price agreements up to date.
Skills and experience
  • Order entry or sales administration experience, ideally in wholesale, distribution or manufacturing.
  • Accurate keying, and the habit of checking a figure before it goes out.
  • Confident on the phone with trade customers.
  • [Your ERP, for example Sage 200, Business Central or SAP Business One] or another sales order system, plus Outlook and Excel.
  • Able to work to a daily cut-off when the inbox is full.
  • Knowledge of [your trade] is useful. We will train the rest.
Systems you will use
[Your ERP]; the orders inbox; [the web portal or EDI], including the orders that fail; the phone; and any spreadsheets that hold price agreements outside the ERP.
How the job is measured
Order accuracy rate, order processing time, and orders received before the cut-off that made that day's picking.

Pay

What ONS figures say about pay for this job.

  • £29,991

    median gross annual pay, full-time stock control clerks and assistants (SOC 2020 code 4133). ONS codes order processors here.

  • £28,745

    median gross annual pay, full-time sales administrators (4151). ONS codes sales order administrators here.

Source: ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, Table 14 (provisional, UK) and the SOC 2020 coding index. Full-time median hourly pay excluding overtime: £15.14 and £14.78. National medians across all industries: check them against local adverts.

Before you hire

Which parts of the job are keying, and which need a person.

Keying a system can take
Reading emailed, PDF and photographed orders into lines. Matching the customer's codes to your products, and "the usual" to their history. Checking prices, stock and repeated PO numbers. Typing the draft order and the confirmation, for a person to approve.
Judgement that stays with your people
Approving every order. Substitutions, price differences and accounts on stop. Phone orders, complaints and call-backs. Short deliveries.
How to decide, in two weeks
  1. Log every order: how it arrived, the minutes spent on it, and anything corrected later. What to log is on our order processing time page.
  2. Have the team note time on calls, queries and problems separately.
  3. If the hours you are hiring for are mostly keying written orders, take the keying off the desk first and see what is left. If they are mostly calls and problems, hire.
  4. Put the keying figures into the order desk calculator to see what they cost a year.

What you get from us

If the hours are keying, we build the keying step.

We build AI into one division of a business and are measured on that division's own numbers. On an order desk, written orders are read and checked against the customer's prices and stock, and wait as a draft order for one click.

  1. 30 minutes

    Call with you

    How orders reach you and where the desk falls behind.

  2. 1 hour

    Session with your desk

    We time real orders. The same day, a one-page verdict: the workflow, the KPI it moves, today's baseline and a fixed price. Or a written no.

  3. A fixed number of weeks

    Build

    Connected to your inbox and your ERP. Your team approves every draft.

  4. Every month

    Run and report

    Order processing time and order errors against the baseline. Stop at any report.

How it works: AI order entry for UK distributors and wholesalers. Nothing is subcontracted.

Questions

What people ask about the sales order processor job.

What does a sales order processor do?
They take orders from every route, enter them into the company's system, check prices, stock and credit, and confirm each order to the customer. In a distributor or manufacturer the job runs to a daily cut-off.
Is a sales order processor the same as a sales order administrator?
Mostly. Firms advertise the same desk as sales order processor, sales order administrator, order processor or order entry clerk. ONS codes the administrator title with sales administrators and the processor title with stock control clerks and assistants.
How much does a sales order processor earn in the UK?
ONS figures for 2025 (provisional) put median gross annual pay for full-time employees at £29,991 for stock control clerks and assistants, the group that includes order processors, and £28,745 for sales administrators.
Can software do the job instead?
Part of it. Reading written orders, matching codes, checking prices and stock and typing the draft can be done by a system, with a person approving every order. Phone orders, substitutions and credit decisions stay with your people.

Next step

Thirty minutes before you advertise.

Tell us how orders reach your desk. If we don't find anything worth doing, we'll tell you and leave. Or send us one order and get back the draft it would become.

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.