Results

Streamlined Over $6M in Purchase Orders with End-to-End Automation

Project summary

We helped a food and manufacturing company fully automate their purchase order intake and fulfillment process—removing over 20 hours of manual work per week. By integrating Docparser, Airtable, ShipStation, and QuickBooks, we built a seamless pipeline that extracts PO data, manages order tracking, and generates invoices automatically.

The challenge

Every PO came in as a PDF via email, and the team manually entered each order—one by one—into their internal system. This included:

• Creating the customer and order in Airtable
• Adding line items
• Tracking fulfillment status manually
• Generating a separate invoice in QuickBooks
  

With 20–30 orders weekly and ~10 minutes per step, the team was spending 6–10+ hours on repetitive data entry alone—not counting fulfillment coordination or invoice follow-up.

What we built

We implemented a fully automated order lifecycle, spanning intake to invoicing:

• Docparser extracts data from a variety of PO formats
• Make watches incoming emails and sends structured PO data to Airtable
• Airtable manages:
  • CRM-linked orders and line items
  • Build sheets auto-generated for warehouse use
  • Status updates pulled from ShipStation via parsed shipping emails
• Once marked shipped, Make creates a QuickBooks Online invoice with correct customer and item mappings
  

Technical hurdles

• PO format variability required flexible parsing rules and fallback logic
• ID sync between Airtable and QuickBooks was critical for avoiding duplicates or mismatches
• ShipStation data had to be reliably extracted from unstructured notification emails
• Handling multi-line orders with nested line items in Airtable
  

Results

• 20–30 orders processed weekly with near-zero manual input
• 20+ hours/week saved across intake, production, and billing
• $6M+ in order value managed through the system to date
• Improved accuracy and visibility into production stages

Takeaway

“What used to take hours of typing and tracking now happens in the background—these automations are doing the work of 5 people”