For UK manufacturers and distributors on SAP Business One
AI order entry for SAP Business One: email orders in, checked and held as drafts.
Orders that arrive by email, PDF or photo are read, checked against your item master data, price lists and stock, and saved in SAP Business One as drafts. Someone on your team approves each one before it becomes a sales order.
Or send us one order and see what we’d read and flag, by the end of the next working day.
The problem
The purchase order uses the customer’s part numbers. SAP Business One needs yours.
A manufacturer’s order desk spends its day translating. A PDF purchase order arrives with the customer’s own part numbers, their units and a delivery date in their format. Someone opens a new sales order in SAP Business One, picks the business partner, looks up each item code, checks the price list and the stock, and keys it. The PDF had all the information. It just wasn’t in your codes.
Ordering is rarely written down for customers in this sector. In our study of 209 UK supplier websites, 69% of the 101 manufacturers say nothing about how a customer should place an order (the research note). Two of the 209 mention AI in how they take orders or quotes, and both describe plans, not something running today.
How it works
SAP Business One sales order automation, step by step.
-
1
Read
Each order is read as it arrived: the email, an attached PDF or spreadsheet, a photo of a handwritten sheet. Customer, part numbers, quantities, units and dates come out as order lines.
-
2
Checked against SAP Business One
The customer is matched to a business partner and each part number to your item code. Prices are checked against the customer’s price list and quantities against stock in the warehouse. Anything that doesn’t match is flagged with the reason.
-
3
Saved as a draft
The order goes into SAP Business One as a draft. Your team reads the flags next to the original email, edits what needs it and approves it as a sales order.
An order, for example
An engineering firm’s purchase order to a fastener manufacturer.
Comes in
Please find PO 77310 attached. Can you confirm the M8 hex bolts can ship this week? Regards, Sanjay, Halden Engineering
Checked
- Business partner matched: Halden Engineering, C20114
- PO 77310: 9 lines read from the PDF
- Halden’s part numbers matched to your item codes
- Prices match Halden’s price list
- M8 hex bolts: 2,000 in stock, 5,000 ordered
Waits for your approval
Draft sales order · 9 lines · 1 short
Saved as a draft in SAP Business One. Your team decides whether to split the delivery before approving it.
Illustration with invented data. More on AI order entry, on emailing orders into other ERPs, and on AI for UK manufacturers.
Connecting to SAP Business One
How we would connect to SAP Business One.
Based on SAP’s own documentation for SAP Business One and its Service Layer, checked in October 2026.
- The route in
- The SAP Business One Service Layer, SAP’s web API for Business One, built on HTTP and OData. It runs on the SAP HANA version and, from version 10.0, on Microsoft SQL Server.
- Sales orders
- Created through the Service Layer’s Orders entity, which SAP labels Sales Order.
- Drafts
- SAP Business One can keep a sales document as a draft, and the Service Layer gives access to drafts. That is where each order waits for your team.
- Items, prices and stock
- Read through the Service Layer, which covers item master data, warehouse stock, price lists and business partners.
- Sales quotations
- The Service Layer handles sales quotations too, and in SAP Business One a quotation doesn’t change stock or accounting figures. If you quote before you sell, see quote automation.
- Older versions
- Installations without the Service Layer have the DI API, SAP’s older programming interface for Business One. The Service Layer is installed on your SAP Business One server, so we would agree access with whoever looks after it, usually your SAP partner.
What it costs you today
Time the translating, then count it.
The cost is the time spent translating and keying, plus the cost of fixing an order that went out wrong. Illustration with invented data: 30 purchase orders a day at 12 minutes each, because every line needs a part number looked up, is 30 hours a week. That is 0.8 of a full-time person.
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.
-
30 minutes
Call with you
Which orders take longest to key, and which number that holds back.
-
1 hour
Session with your order desk
We watch real orders go into SAP Business One. 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.
-
A fixed number of weeks
Build
We build it and connect it to your SAP Business One. Nothing is subcontracted.
-
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 SAP Business One order automation.
- Does SAP Business One have an API for sales orders?
- Yes. The SAP Business One Service Layer is SAP’s web API for Business One, and its Orders entity is the sales order. Older installations use the DI API.
- Where does AI come into SAP order entry?
- In the reading. An order that says “50 of the usual M8s and washers to suit” has to be read the way a person reads it before it can be matched to item codes. The matching and checking follow rules we set up with your team, and the approval stays with your team.
- Could a wrong order reach the warehouse?
- Each order waits as a draft in SAP Business One until someone on your team approves it, with the flags shown next to the customer’s original email.
- We run SAP Business One on SQL Server. Does that matter?
- The Service Layer runs on Microsoft SQL Server from SAP Business One 10.0, as well as on SAP HANA. On older versions we would use the DI API.
- 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 SAP Business One 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.