How to Turn Emailed Purchase Orders into Business Central Sales Orders
Stop retyping PDF and Excel purchase orders into Dynamics 365 Business Central
Your customers email their purchase orders as PDFs, spreadsheets and scans, and someone on your team opens each one and keys the lines into a Business Central sales order. This guide shows how Mail2ERP does that step for you: it reads the email and its attachments, finds the customer and the items in Business Central, and creates a sales order for an order or a sales quote for a price request. You connect your mailbox and Business Central online in a few minutes, start in Demo Mode, and the first month is a free Discovery month.
🎯 “We Still Type Every Emailed PO into Business Central”
That is the sentence we hear most from distributors and wholesalers on Business Central. The ERP itself is fine. The problem sits in front of it: orders arrive by email, in whatever format each customer’s purchasing system produces, and nothing turns those attachments into sales lines except a person.
- Every customer has a different layout. One sends a clean PDF from their ERP, one an Excel file with their own column order, one a scanned form, and one simply lists item numbers in the email body.
- The work is slow and easy to get wrong. Item numbers, quantities, the customer’s PO number and the requested delivery date all have to be copied correctly. A swapped digit becomes a wrong shipment and a correction later.
- Orders wait for people. An order that arrives after hours sits until someone is back at a desk, and a price request answered a day late is often a price request lost.
- Price requests and orders are mixed together. Someone has to decide for every email whether it needs a sales quote or a sales order before they even start typing.
The volume adds up quickly. One Mail2ERP customer, IMP Kontakt, receives thousands of orders and RFQs a month by email — a workload that would need a dedicated data-entry team if it were typed by hand.
🔍 What Business Central Teams Usually Try First
Copy and paste from the attachment
The most common method is still the oldest one: open the PDF on one screen, the sales order on the other, and copy line by line. It works for five orders a day. At fifty it becomes someone’s whole job, and the error rate grows with the volume.
Import templates and flows built per customer
Some teams build an import or a workflow for their largest customers’ files. Each one only understands one layout. When the customer changes their template, adds a column or a new customer arrives, the import breaks or someone has to build another one.
AI features inside Business Central
Microsoft is adding AI to Business Central, including a Sales Order Agent. If you are weighing it against an outside tool, read our comparison Mail2ERP vs Business Central’s Sales Order Agent. This guide covers how Mail2ERP itself works with Business Central.
⚠️ What the job really needs
A tool that reads any layout in any language without templates, tells a price request from an order, finds the right customer and item numbers in your Business Central company, leaves pricing to Business Central, and never creates the same document twice.
⚙️ How Mail2ERP Works with Business Central
Customer email arrives
Mail2ERP reads and matches
Sales order or sales quote in Business Central
Email filed to PROCESSED
Which document it creates
Mail2ERP classifies every email as a price request, an order or neither. A price request becomes a sales quote, and a firm order becomes a sales order — one document per email, header and lines in one step. Business Central’s API has no separate release step, so the sales order stands as created.
How customers and items are matched
- Customer: the sender’s email address must belong to a customer in Business Central, or to a contact person linked to a customer. Mail2ERP never creates customers, and it refuses customers that are blocked.
- Items: product codes in the email are matched to your item numbers. With the Barcodes switch on, the item’s GTIN is matched too. Business Central’s API offers no item references, vendor item numbers or manufacturer part numbers, so matching uses item number and GTIN only. Blocked items are refused, and Mail2ERP never creates items.
- Quantities: a line whose quantity cannot be read with confidence is skipped, not guessed, and you get an email asking you to add it by hand.
Prices come from Business Central
Mail2ERP does not copy the customer’s price into the line when it matches the item’s unit price. Business Central then prices the line itself, so your customer prices and line discounts stay in force, and Business Central applies its own taxes. The price in the email is used only when the item has no unit price.
What else lands on the document
- External Document No.: the customer’s own PO number, so your team and the customer talk about the same reference.
- Delivery date: the requested date goes onto the sales order as the requested delivery date and the line shipment date.
- Notes and files: a note from the customer becomes comment lines on the document; the email text is attached as a text file and the original attachments are attached to the sales order or quote.
- Ship-to: the customer’s default ship-to address stays, because the API has no ship-to codes to choose from.
When the customer orders against your quote
With RFQ Detection on, a reply that quotes the number of your sales quote and clearly says “order” turns that quote into a sales order with Business Central’s Make Order action. Mail2ERP orders the full quote; if the customer changes quantities, a note for your team is attached to the order.
No duplicates
Before it creates anything, Mail2ERP records what it is about to create and carries its own marker in the External Document No. when the customer gives no PO number. If a run is interrupted, the next run finds the document instead of creating a second one. The same order sent to two addresses or forwarded again is imported once; with AutoSPAM the copy moves to _AutoSPAM/DUPLICATES.
🛠️ Step-by-Step Setup
- Step 1 — Start your free Discovery month: sign in at bots4.me/bots, click Start free Discovery month on the Mail2ERP card and accept the Terms once. No card is needed.
- Step 2 — Connect your mailbox: open Settings → Mail2ERP → Access Manager → Add Source. Microsoft 365 and Gmail use Secure Quick Connect; other providers connect over IMAP with an app password. Details for every provider are in Getting Connected. You can also skip the mailbox and forward orders to mail2erp@bots4.me from your account address.
- Step 3 — Connect Business Central: click Add Destination, choose the Dynamics 365 Business Central tile and Sign in with Microsoft with a work account that has a Business Central licence. No passwords or API keys are stored. BOTS4.me works with that user’s permissions.
- Step 4 — Pick the environment and company: BOTS4.me lists your environments (production and sandboxes) and their companies. With one company it is picked for you; otherwise pick it on the Business Central card and click Save.
- Step 5 — Check permissions: Mail2ERP needs to read customers, contacts and items and to create sales quotes and sales orders. The standard permission set D365 BUS FULL ACCESS covers every BOTS4.me app.
- Step 6 — Run in DEMO, then go LIVE: Mail2ERP starts in Demo Mode and emails you what it would create. When the reports look right, set Mode to LIVE on the Control tab.
🔐 If Microsoft asks for an administrator
Many organisations let only an administrator approve new apps. Click Ask your Microsoft admin in the Business Central form and send the link to your Microsoft 365 administrator; one approval covers everyone in your organisation. Accountants working in a client’s Business Central as a guest type the client’s domain or tenant ID into Tenant (domain or ID) before signing in.
Business Central online is supported; on-premises installations are not.
🧭 Your First Week: Demo Mode, Test Order, LIVE
Check the Control tab
- Mode: DEMO reads your real emails and Business Central data and writes nothing to Business Central — you get an email showing the quote or order it would have created. LIVE becomes available after the first DEMO report email.
- Operating Hours and Weekends: Mail2ERP runs inside these hours, which start as weekday office hours. Widen them if evening and weekend orders should be imported too.
- Discovery switches: switches with a Discovery tag are included in your free month and start switched off. For Business Central, Barcodes (GTIN matching), RFQ Detection and Separate External (unknown senders go to _Mail2ERP/EXTERNAL instead of staying in your INBOX) are the useful ones.
Send a test order
Send an email from an address that belongs to a customer in Business Central and list two or three item numbers with quantities — in the text or as a PDF or Excel attachment. After the next run the DEMO report arrives, and the decision appears in the Logs tab and in the _Mail2ERP/LOGS folder of your mailbox (see the LOGS folder guide). Send a second email that asks only for a price to see a sales quote.
Correct it with folders, then go LIVE
Drag an email into _Mail2ERP/QUOTATION or _Mail2ERP/ORDERS to retry it as a quote or an order, or into _Mail2ERP/SKIP to skip that kind of email in future. Each move also teaches Mail2ERP how to treat that sender. When the DEMO reports look right, switch to LIVE.
📅 When the Discovery month ends
When the month ends, Mail2ERP continues on the free plan by itself with a small monthly allowance: when it is used, new items wait until next month or until you choose a plan, and an item already started always finishes. Choose a plan to keep all features — see the plan table on the Mail2ERP product page.
The free plan reads email text, PDF, CSV and HTML; scanned PDFs, images, Excel, Word and the Discovery switches need a plan. Nothing you imported is undone.
📅 Unclear Emails and Day-to-Day Operation
Once live, Mail2ERP reads PDF, Excel, Word, CSV, HTML, images and scanned documents with OCR — in any language, with no templates, within the operating hours you set.
- Imported emails move to _Mail2ERP/PROCESSED; the sales order or quote is already in Business Central with the original files attached.
- Unclear emails stay in your INBOX, unread. The log line says why — for example a sender who is not a customer, an item number that does not exist, or a blocked item. Fix the cause in Business Central and drag the email into _Mail2ERP/QUOTATION or _Mail2ERP/ORDERS; it is retried on the next run.
- A moved email that still fails sends your mailbox a short explanation of why and what to do next. Your customer never receives it.
- API limits: Business Central limits API calls per user. BOTS4.me spreads its calls and waits when Business Central asks it to slow down.
The platform is EU-hosted, built for GDPR and offers 2FA. Reports, logs and mailbox folders are available in 31 languages. The same Business Central connection serves the other BOTS4.me apps — for example AutoERP, which posts the invoices for shipped orders (see Automatic Invoicing in Business Central).
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Can Business Central create sales orders from PDF attachments in emails?
Mail2ERP does exactly that: it reads the PDF, Excel, Word or scanned attachment, matches the customer and the item numbers in your Business Central company and creates the sales order through Business Central’s API. Price requests become sales quotes instead.
Does it work with Business Central on-premises?
No. Mail2ERP connects to Business Central online through Microsoft sign-in. On-premises installations are not supported.
Will it use our customer prices and discounts?
Yes. When the price in the email matches the item’s unit price, Mail2ERP sends no price at all, so Business Central prices the line with your own customer prices and line discounts and applies its own taxes. The email price is used only when the item has no unit price in Business Central.
Our customers use their own part numbers. Can Mail2ERP map them?
In Business Central, Mail2ERP matches your item number and the item’s GTIN barcode. The API does not expose item references, so customer part numbers stored there are not used. If an email carries only the customer’s own codes, it stays in your INBOX with the reason in the log.
Which Business Central permissions does the connection need?
BOTS4.me acts with the permissions of the licensed user who signs in. For Mail2ERP that user needs to read customers, contacts and items and to create sales quotes and sales orders. D365 BUS FULL ACCESS covers all BOTS4.me apps.
What happens if the same PO is emailed twice?
It is imported once. Mail2ERP records every document before it creates it and finds it again on the next run, so an interrupted run or a forwarded copy never produces a second sales order.
Can I try it without touching our live company?
Yes, in two ways. Demo Mode writes nothing to Business Central and emails you what it would create. You can also pick a sandbox environment on the Business Central card and test there first.
📚 Related Reading
- The full feature list: Mail2ERP product page and the Mail2ERP guide.
- After the order is in: Automatic Invoicing in Business Central — AutoERP posts and sends the invoices for shipped orders.
- Comparing options: Mail2ERP vs Business Central’s Sales Order Agent and Parseur, Docparser or Nanonets vs Mail2ERP.
- A real example: Case study: IMP Kontakt.
- Background: Understanding ERP and CRM systems.
🔗 Sources and Further Reading
Official documentation referenced in this guide. External links open in a new tab.
Let Business Central Receive Its Own Orders
Connect your mailbox and Business Central in a few minutes, watch Mail2ERP work in Demo Mode, and go live only when you are confident. The first month is a free Discovery month, with no card needed.
More than one process to automate, or an ERP that is not on our list? We build it for you: book a free call →