From an emailed PDF to an order in your ERP.
Your customers email purchase orders as PDFs, and somebody on your side retypes them. Everyone agrees this should be automated and almost nobody explains what the automation has to get right. This page does, including the part where we tell you not to buy it yet.
What the flow actually is
Six steps, and the fifth is the one that decides whether the whole thing is trustworthy:
- The order arrives at a dedicated address — a mailbox that exists only for inbound orders, so nothing has to be forwarded by hand.
- The attachment is read. PDF, scan or email body; the supplier keeps sending exactly what they always sent.
- The lines are matched against your own catalogue — your SKUs, your prices, your units. An extraction that cannot name the article number has not finished.
- Each field gets a confidence score, and the order as a whole gets one.
- The uncertain ones go to a person and the rest do not. This is the step that separates a system you can leave running from one somebody has to babysit — and it is the step generic advice skips.
- The order is delivered into the ERP as a structured document, and the original email is archived with a link back to it, so the audit trail survives the automation.
EHF Ordre is not EHF Faktura
This is worth a heading of its own, because searching for order automation returns invoice tooling almost every time. The two are different documents, going in opposite directions, at opposite ends of the trade.
- EHF Faktura is the bill. It travels from supplier to buyer, after the goods. Norwegian public bodies have required it for years, so most of the tooling and most of the writing is about this one.
- EHF Ordre 3.0 (Peppol BIS Order 3.0) is the purchase order. It travels from buyer to supplier, before anything ships. It is the same network and the same audit chain — a different document at the other end of the transaction.
A PDF-to-e-invoice converter will not help you with an inbound order, and the reason the search results are full of them is that the invoice half of Peppol got solved first. If you are retyping orders, you are looking for the order half.
The parts that are actually hard
Extraction is the part everyone demonstrates. It is not the part that fails:
- Catalogue matching. The customer writes their own article name, not yours. Every order line has to resolve to something your ERP recognises, and the ones that resolve to nothing must not be guessed.
- Knowing what you do not know. A number extracted confidently and wrongly is worse than one flagged as uncertain, so field-level confidence has to be real and has to be visible.
- Where the ceiling sits. Auto-approval needs hard caps — an order value above which a human always looks, a sender too new to trust, a line that did not match.
- The review pass itself. If checking a machine-read order takes as long as typing it, nothing has been saved. The target is seconds, and that is a design problem, not a model problem.
- Keeping the source. Under bokføringsloven the original document is the record; the extraction is a convenience on top of it.
Who this is not for, yet
Inbound order automation delivers into Peppol, so it assumes you can already receive Peppol documents in your ERP. If you are not on Peppol yet, the right order of work is to get there first and come back for the inbound layer afterwards — buying the automation before the network gives you a well-extracted order with nowhere to go. We would rather say that here than in a sales call.
How EHForder does it
A dedicated inbound address per customer, AI extraction on EU-resident inference, per-line price and stock checks against your ERP, and a Reviewer screen built so a high-confidence order takes about fourteen seconds. Auto-approval is opt-in and calibrated over the first thirty days, with every order going to a human until you say otherwise.
The output is a schematron-validated EHF Ordre 3.0 / Peppol BIS Order 3.0 document transmitted over Peppol AS4. Your customers change nothing: they keep emailing you PDFs exactly as they do today.
More detail in how it works, and what it costs in pricing.