Sales order and purchase order automation, built as AI agents on your own ERP.

Several do, on their own platforms. Salesforce Order Management lists Agentic Order Routing and Agentic Order Support. Fluent Commerce announced an AI agent for order sourcing on June 16, 2026, and documents a pilot server that feeds order status to customer service agents. Kibo describes an agentic framework across commerce and order management. Pipe17 says its AI routes each order to the best fulfillment location, and fulfillmenttools says AI agents weigh every fulfillment option. Each one works inside that vendor's product. FactoryJet builds custom agents on the ERP or store you already run.

It depends on what is broken. If you need requests, approvals and receipts, look at purchasing software. Precoro lists its Core plan from $499 a month, billed annually, with purchase orders, receipts and automated approvals. If you only need to create and send purchase orders, QuickBooks and Xero both include them. If the hard part is deciding what to buy from live sales orders and stock, that is a job for your ERP's reorder rules or a built agent. No single product is best for every firm.

List prices we read on 11 Oct 2026 run from free tiers to five figures a year. Parseur lists $129 a month for 1,000 pages. Beam AI lists a Pro plan at $50 a month for 200 tasks. Orderful lists Web EDI at $189 a month per trading partner. Precoro starts at $499 a month, billed annually. Rossum starts at $18,000 per year. Conexiom, Kibo, Pipe17, Salesforce Order Management and SPS Commerce quote on request. Ask each maker what counts as an order, a page or a task before you compare.

Published market ranges for a build are wide. ProductCrafters puts AI agent development at $5,000 to $180,000 or more in its 2026 cost guide. Layer3 Labs puts a single-workflow automation build at $5,000 to $15,000 and a multi-workflow project at $15,000 to $50,000. Both directions across two systems is a bigger job than one order mailbox on one ERP. FactoryJet gives you two fixed prices in writing after a short scoping call, one for the build and one for ongoing support.

Buy when your orders arrive in a few steady layouts, when you need one job done such as purchasing approvals or warehouse routing, or when a customer requires EDI and a network solves it. Have agents built when every customer orders differently, when the checks depend on prices, stock and credit inside your ERP, or when sales orders and purchase orders need to talk to each other. The two also combine. An EDI network can carry your largest accounts while an agent handles the emailed orders.

Order processing is everything between a customer saying yes and the goods leaving your building. The order is received, entered as a sales order, checked for price, stock and credit, approved, picked, packed, shipped and invoiced. Order automation usually means the first half, from receiving the order to an approved sales order in the ERP. That is where the retyping happens, and it is the half an AI agent can draft for a person to approve.

They are two views of the same deal. A purchase order, or PO, is written by the buyer and says what they want, at what price and when. A sales order is written by the seller and records the commitment to supply it. Oracle's NetSuite help describes a sales order as a transaction that records a commitment to sell items or services to a customer. Your customer's PO becomes your sales order, and your own PO becomes your supplier's sales order.

It is software that turns an incoming customer order into a sales order in your ERP with as little retyping as possible. Older tools read fixed templates. Current ones use AI to read any layout, then match the customer and the items, check price and stock, and write a draft. The useful measure is how many orders reach your approver needing no correction. A person still approves the order, and anything unusual goes to them first.

In four steps. First, switch on what your ERP has. Odoo raises a request for quotation when a reordering rule is triggered, and NetSuite creates a purchase order for a drop-ship line when the sales order is approved. Second, set approval limits so each order goes to the right person. Third, send approved orders to suppliers by email or EDI from the ERP. Fourth, add an agent for what the rules miss, such as buying for a one-off job or reading the supplier's confirmation.

Yes, as a first draft. An AI model can read a purchase order in almost any layout. An agent can then match the customer and the part numbers, check price and stock in your ERP and write the sales order as a draft. What it should not do is confirm an order nobody has looked at. In the agents we build, every order waits for a person at first, and you choose later which routine repeat orders can skip that step.

The header holds the customer, their PO number, the bill-to and ship-to addresses, payment terms and the date they need the goods. Each line holds an item, a quantity, a unit and a price. Then come freight, tax and any notes, such as ship complete. ERPNext's manual lists the same parts: items, prices, quantities, delivery dates, shipping details and terms. These are the fields an agent reads from the customer's purchase order and checks before it writes the draft.

The usual four are standard, planned, blanket and contract. A standard purchase order is one order for known items, price and date. A planned order fixes the items and price and leaves delivery dates open. A blanket order agrees a price for repeat releases over a period. A contract order sets terms before any items are named. ERPs use their own names. NetSuite's help lists blanket purchase orders and purchase contracts, and SAP Business One's Service Layer lists BlanketAgreements.

Yes. Intuit's own page says QuickBooks creates purchase orders with custom PO numbers and copies the items, quantities and rates into a bill once the order is complete. In the QuickBooks Online API a purchase order is a non-posting transaction with a status of Open or Closed. The gap is on the selling side. Intuit's API reference lists estimates and invoices and no sales order, so on QuickBooks Online an agent holds a customer's order as an estimate until it is ready to invoice.

Yes. Xero's US site says you can create and send purchase orders online, then convert them into bills, and that user roles control who can approve them. A new purchase order can be saved or submitted for approval. We build Xero integrations. An agent working with Xero drafts the purchase order and leaves it for your approver, the same way it does on an ERP.

Yes. The agent creates the sales order through NetSuite's API and saves it as Pending Approval. Oracle's help says an order in that status must be approved by someone with the right permissions before NetSuite can process it, and that a sales order does not affect your accounts until items ship. Plan for two limits. A transaction can hold up to 500 lines, and a partly fulfilled order cannot be set back to Pending Approval.

Odoo already models both directions. Confirming a quotation makes it a sales order, and confirming a request for quotation makes it a purchase order. Reordering rules raise RFQs when stock runs low. An agent adds the reading. It turns a customer's emailed order into a quotation with the right customer, items and prices, ready to confirm. Check your plan first. Odoo's documentation says access to data through its external API is only available on Custom plans.

Yes. SAP Business One has an API called the Service Layer. SAP's reference lists Orders, which it describes as a commitment from a customer or lead to buy, and PurchaseOrders, a document used to request items or services from a vendor. It also lists Drafts and ApprovalRequests. So an agent can write a sales order or a purchase order as a draft and leave it in your normal approval flow. SAP says OData Version 4 is the primary protocol as of feature package 2405.

Yes to both. ERPNext keeps a saved sales order in Draft until someone selects Submit, which is a natural place for an agent's work to wait. Frappe's REST API reaches sales orders and purchase orders with an API key and secret. A custom ERP takes one extra step at the start. We list what it exposes, whether that is an API, a database or file imports, and build to that. FactoryJet has worked on ERPNext and on custom ERPs.

It follows the customer's size and systems. Large retailers, distributors and manufacturers with many suppliers usually ask for EDI, where their system sends a structured order, the X12 850 in the US, straight to yours. Smaller customers send whatever their own software produces, such as a PDF, a spreadsheet or a typed email. Most sellers get both. EDI orders are already structured, so they skip the reading step. Email orders need an AI model to read them. Both need the same checks before they become sales orders.

Often, yes, for two reasons. First, EDI covers only the customers who use it, and the rest still email. Second, an EDI order can still be wrong for you. The price may be out of date, the item discontinued or the date impossible. An EDI network delivers the message and leaves the decision to you. The agent applies your rules to EDI orders and email orders alike, and sends the exceptions to a person.

Yes. Once your team approves the sales order, the agent prepares the acknowledgment from it, so the customer sees the items, prices and ship date you have accepted. By email that is a confirmation with the order attached. By EDI it is the 855, which X12 titles Purchase Order Acknowledgment. Where a line differs from what the customer asked for, such as a later date, the acknowledgment says so plainly, and a person releases it.

Yes. EDI integration is work FactoryJet does. Usually an EDI network such as SPS Commerce or Orderful handles the connection to each trading partner, and we build the link between that network and your ERP, with the same checks an emailed order gets. Orderful lists an Integrated plan starting at $399 a month, and SPS Commerce quotes on request. Punchout catalogs are part of the same work.

It depends on your customers' documents, so we measure it on yours. Ahead of launch the agent reads a batch of orders you have already entered, and each field is scored against what your team keyed. Clean PDFs from a customer's ERP are the easy case. Handwriting and faxes need more review. Makers publish their own figures, and Beam AI's page states 99.8%. The safer question is what happens to the fields the agent is unsure of. In our builds they are marked for a person.

The order stops and a person sees why. An item the agent cannot place, a price that differs from your price list, a customer on credit hold or a date you cannot meet each puts the draft in a review list, with the reason beside it and the original order attached. Your team corrects it, and the correction is kept, so the same customer part number is recognized next time. Nothing is confirmed to the customer until someone approves it.

No, unless you decide it should for named cases. By default the agent drafts each purchase order and your buyer approves it inside the limits your ERP already holds. After the agent has run beside your team for a while, you may choose to let routine repeat orders under a set value go without review. That is your decision, it is written down, and it can be reversed. New suppliers, new items and anything over the limit always go to a person.

A pilot on one narrow job, such as one order mailbox writing draft sales orders, usually takes two to four weeks. A full production agent, including permissions, logging, approvals and monitoring, usually takes six to twelve weeks. Adding the purchasing side, EDI or a second system puts a project toward the longer end. At the start a person approves every draft, which lets you judge the agent on live orders before you give it more to do.

Yes. You see working software running on your own data before you sign anything. We take a batch of purchase orders your customers have already sent and let a first version of the agent read them. Then you put each draft next to the sales order your team entered and check the part numbers it mapped and the prices it queried. That review is also where we say so if your ERP's own tools or a rented product would cover the job.

You do. The agents are built for you, and the code, the written rules, the part-number list and the test orders are yours. You can have them run in a cloud account that belongs to you. Day to day, FactoryJet keeps managing the servers, the AI models, the API connections and the maintenance, so that work never lands on your team. Should you later bring the work in-house or hand it to another firm, all of it moves with you.

Orders are kept where they are today, in your mailbox and your ERP. Reading one means passing it to an AI model. You get a written list of that provider and every other system your data passes through before the build starts, so your IT lead can review it. Inside the ERP the agent has a user of its own. That user can read customers, items, prices and stock and write drafts. It cannot approve an order or change a price.