Your biggest customers might send orders through EDI. Everyone else sends a PDF.
So someone watches the orders inbox, opens each attachment, and keys the order into Macola line by line: customer, ship-to, items, quantities, prices. On a quiet day that's manageable. On a busy day, orders sit in the inbox waiting their turn, and a transposed quantity doesn't show up until picking, shipping, or invoicing.
This post walks through a real workflow our team built in AI Automation that takes those emailed purchase orders from the inbox all the way to a sales order in Macola. If you've been looking for a way to automate Macola purchase orders that arrive by email, without asking every customer to change how they send them, this is what it looks like.
Emailed purchase orders stick around for good reasons. Plenty of customers don't do EDI and never will. Each one sends orders in its own layout, from its own system. And the order is legitimate business you want to process quickly, so it can't just wait.
That leaves a job with a lot of repetition and very little judgment:
Most of that work is reading and re-keying. That's exactly the part software can take over, as long as it can handle different layouts and knows when to ask for help.
Here's the workflow step by step. It's Use Case 2 on our Macola workflow automation page, built in AI Automation with no code involved.
The workflow monitors your orders mailbox. When an email arrives with "PO" or "Purchase Order" in the subject line and at least one attachment, the workflow starts. Everything else in the inbox is left alone.
The workflow saves each attachment from the email, so one email carrying several purchase orders is handled just as easily as one carrying a single PO.
Each attachment runs through AI Interpreter using a sales order template. Interpreter reads the document and pulls out what Macola needs: the customer, items, quantities, and the rest of the order details. It handles documents from different customers in different layouts, and reads more than PDFs, including Word, Excel, and image files.
In the workflow our team built, the Interpreter template is set to process automatically. From the moment the email arrives to the moment the order is in Macola, nobody touches it.
Automatic doesn't mean guessing. When Interpreter isn't confident about a field, whether a quantity is smudged, a part number doesn't match, or something required is missing, it doesn't push the order through. It flags that document as needing attention in Interpreter's Inbound Manager, where someone on your team can review the specific field in question and fix it.
That's the real shift for your order-entry team. Instead of keying every order, they look only at the ones that genuinely need a second look. And every submitted document becomes a permanent, read-only record, so you always have an audit trail of what came in and what was entered.
If you'd rather have a person check every order at first, Interpreter templates don't have to process automatically. Many teams start with review on, watch the results for a few weeks, then switch to automatic once they trust them.
AI Interpreter is what reads the purchase order. AI Automation is what connects your inbox to it and decides what happens around it. That distinction matters once you start building on the basics:
If you want the broader view of what AI can do alongside Macola, including where document processing fits, AI for Macola ERP: What's Actually Possible in 2026 covers it.
This isn't a replacement for EDI. If your largest trading partners already send orders electronically, keep that running. The email workflow covers everyone else: the customers who send a PDF, a spreadsheet, or a scanned order form, and who aren't going to change that because you asked.
In practice, that's often a long tail of customers who each send a handful of orders, which is exactly why keying them by hand adds up.
Before building anything, it helps to get a rough picture of the work you'd be taking off your team's plate. You don't need exact numbers; a week of honest tallying is enough.
If the answers point to hours every week and mistakes that surface downstream, emailed POs are a strong candidate. If you only get a handful a month, another process may deserve to go first.
The work splits between the people who own order entry and the person who builds the workflow.
Your order-entry or customer service team decides:
An IT staff member or power user who knows your Macola data builds it:
A practical tip: start with one document type, or even a handful of your most frequent customers, before expanding. You'll see results quickly, and the team gets comfortable with the flagged-for-review step before volume ramps up.
If you're weighing this against other processes, run it through the five questions in Which Macola Processes Should You Automate First? Emailed purchase orders usually answer yes to all five.
If your team spends part of every day retyping orders from the inbox, talk to us about automation. Bring a few real purchase orders, and we'll show you what this workflow looks like with your documents and your Macola setup.
Q: How do I automate Macola purchase orders that arrive by email? A: With AI Automation, a workflow watches your orders inbox for emails with "PO" or "Purchase Order" in the subject and an attachment, saves the attachments, runs each one through AI Interpreter, and enters the sales order in Macola.
Q: What happens if the AI can't read part of a purchase order? A: AI Interpreter doesn't guess. If it isn't confident about a field, it flags the document as needing attention in its Inbound Manager so someone can review and fix that specific field before the order is entered.
Q: Can every order be reviewed by a person before it's entered? A: Yes. The workflow our team built processes orders automatically, but Interpreter templates can also hold documents for review. Many teams start with review on and switch to automatic once they trust the results.
Q: Does this replace EDI? A: No. EDI keeps running for trading partners who use it. The email workflow covers customers who send purchase orders as PDFs, spreadsheets, or scanned forms.
Q: Do we need a developer to set this up? A: No. AI Automation is no-code. Your order-entry team decides which inbox, documents, and review rules to use, and an IT staff member or power user who knows your Macola data builds the workflow.