Sage 100

Customer needs a Sage 100 add on that will read a pdf attached to an email and the information from the pdf gets put into sales order entry as an order. Anybody had any experiences??

You mean something like this https://docparser.com/blog/convert-pdf-csv-extract-text-from-pdf/

Thank you for your quick response.

Yes. Something like this. It would be even better if it would go directly into MAS

What kind of budget? I would think DocLinks could be set up to do this on the SO side just as it does from PO/AP side.

If it can parse the data to a the same file regularly, could you schedule an import job from that file?

Well, I am not the Doclink expert, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done as AP and PO are handled. @JimWoodhead writes the interfaces for me.

There was a vendor at Summit that did this (aside from Altec).. their web site is: https://conexiom.com. I talked to them just to have the information in case it ever came up again, but I have never worked with them aside from that.

interesting- instead of OCR it look like you build a template for each customer's inbound orders. Let us know if you pursue it further.

I haven't used DocParser but my experience with other PDF conversion utilities is not great (Adobe, Nuance, PDFElement). The conversions don't see columns clearly with PDF documents that originate as forms, also two incoming PO's can be interpreted differently based on the dimension of the content, resulting in inconsistent column assignments. We recently used PDFElement to try to recover some GL Detail Transactions from PDF paperless office files. The import did about 90% of the work, but i had to manually align columns on the other 10%. I also noted that Detail Transactions from A/P and S/O produced different CSV results. I was looking for a PDF conversion tool to that allowed me the ability to outline the incoming documents and assign column locations for the CSV File but didn't find it. FYI: I had to use XLSX files for my imports because of embedded commas and quotes.

Does the customer have a _good_ reason to **not** use eCommerce for the order placement? They will likely spend a lot of time, money and aggravation dealing with an ultimately-imperfect email conversion method. I doubt any of their customers would object to entering the orders via the web. At least have this conversation with the customer.

I have a customer who approached me with a very similar request. Instead of PDF, their customers email a spreadsheet order form. I immediately suggested e-Commerce and their response was that they felt the customers wouldn't go online to place the orders and some of their customers were so small and unsophisticated that they prefer spreadsheets. I'm in the midst of re-designing their Excel order form then create a VI job based on the form.

Spreadsheets are better than pdf, for sure. That said, in today's online age, and with the oldest Millenials in their customer orgs pushing 40, a conclusion like that is more likely confirmation bias than Reality. I wonder what format their competitors are getting their orders?

I feel like Acumatica can do this... Could be wrong though..

Thanks for the great comments team. It sounds like I got my answer of the pdf parser (stay away) and look for another solution - ebiz or spreadsheets.