How to Import Email Orders into Zoho Inventory and Zoho Books

🎯 “Orders Come by Email, Zoho Waits for Us to Type Them”

Zoho Inventory is good at what happens after the sales order exists: packages, shipments, stock per warehouse. The step before is still manual for most teams:

• Every order is a new layout: a PDF from one customer’s ERP, a spreadsheet from another, a few SKUs typed into an email from a third.
• Codes don’t match: customers write a barcode or a manufacturer part number, and someone looks up your SKU.
• Orders and price requests mixed: each email has to be sorted into “sales order” or “estimate” first.
• Packing waits for typing: until the sales order exists, the warehouse cannot pack, so a slow inbox means slower shipping.

At higher volumes this becomes a job of its own. One Mail2ERP customer, IMP Kontakt, handles thousands of emailed orders and RFQs a month without retyping them.

🔍 What Zoho Users Usually Try First

Typing the sales order by hand

Reliable at low volume, a bottleneck at high volume — and the bottleneck sits right in front of your warehouse.

Spreadsheet imports

A spreadsheet import works when the data is already a clean table. Your customers’ purchase orders are not, so someone still converts every order first.

Workflow tools and parsers

Automation recipes can create a sales order from clean data, and parsers can extract fields from a known layout. Matching your SKUs, choosing the right customer and deciding between estimate and sales order remains your work. We compare these tools in Parseur, Docparser or Nanonets vs Mail2ERP.

⚙️ How Mail2ERP Works with Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory

One organisation, two apps

Zoho Books and Zoho Inventory share one organisation. Mail2ERP writes sales orders and estimates through Zoho Books, so they appear in Zoho Inventory at the same moment. Zoho Inventory is used where Books has nothing to offer: packages, shipments and stock per location — which is where AutoERP takes over if you use it.

Which document it creates

• A firm order becomes a sales order, which Mail2ERP then confirms (opens), so it is ready for packing.
• A price request becomes a draft estimate.
• No sales orders in your plan? Sales orders need Zoho Books Professional or higher, or Zoho Inventory. Without them, Mail2ERP records customer orders as estimates and says so on the document.

Customers and items

• Customer: the sender’s email address must belong to a customer in Zoho or to one of its contact persons; that contact person is set on the document. Mail2ERP never creates customers.
• SKU: product codes in the email are matched to your item SKUs.
• Barcodes: with the Barcodes switch on, the item’s UPC, EAN and ISBN are matched too.
• Part numbers: with the Manufacturer Part Number switch on, the item’s part number is matched.
• Zoho keeps no per-vendor part numbers and no customer references on items, so those two switches have nothing to match in Zoho.

Prices and taxes from Zoho

Each line gets the price Zoho gives that customer: the rate from the customer’s price list, otherwise the item’s rate. Zoho applies the item’s default tax itself. The price in the email is used only when Zoho has no price for the item.

What else goes onto the document

• Reference#: the customer’s PO number.
• Shipment date on sales orders, from the requested delivery date; on estimates the requested date is noted in a comment.
• Shipping address: the customer’s address chosen for the delivery when the email names one.
• Notes and files: a message from the customer goes into the notes; the email text is added as a comment; the original files are attached. If every attachment fails to upload, the draft is removed again rather than left half-done.

Estimate to sales order, and duplicates

With RFQ Detection on, a reply that quotes your estimate number and clearly orders it turns the estimate into an open sales order with the same lines, and the estimate is marked accepted. If the customer asks for different quantities, the full estimate is ordered and a note for your team is added. Before creating anything, Mail2ERP records what it is about to create and searches for it after an interrupted run, so a second sales order is never made. For extra safety, add a text custom field named BOTS4.me ID to estimates and sales orders, and every document Mail2ERP creates is marked with it.

🛠️ 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: Settings → Mail2ERP → Access Manager → Add Source. Gmail, Microsoft 365 and Zoho Mail use Secure Quick Connect; other providers connect over IMAP. See Getting Connected. Or forward orders to mail2erp@bots4.me without connecting a mailbox.
• Step 3 — Connect Zoho: Add Destination → the Zoho Books / Inventory tile → Connect Zoho. Sign in, click Accept, and BOTS4.me finds your data centre and organisation by itself. If your login has several organisations, pick one on the Zoho card and click Save organisation.
• Step 4 — Optional duplicate field: add the text custom field BOTS4.me ID to estimates and sales orders in Zoho.
• Step 5 — Run in DEMO, then go LIVE: Mail2ERP starts in Demo Mode and emails you what it would have created. When the reports look right, set Mode to LIVE on the Control tab.

Every Zoho data centre works (.com, .eu, .in and the others). Zoho limits API calls per organisation per day; BOTS4.me shares that limit with your other Zoho integrations and pauses until Zoho allows calls again when it is reached.

🧭 Your First Week in the Discovery Month

• Mode: DEMO reads your emails and Zoho data and writes nothing; LIVE becomes available after the first DEMO report email.
• Operating Hours and Weekends: Mail2ERP runs inside these hours, weekday office hours to start with.
• Discovery switches: switches with a Discovery tag are included in your free month and start switched off. On Zoho, Barcodes, Manufacturer Part Number, RFQ Detection and Separate External are the useful ones.
• Test order: email two or three SKUs with quantities from a customer’s address, then a second email that only asks for prices. The DEMO reports show a sales order and an estimate; the decisions are also in the Logs tab and the _Mail2ERP/LOGS folder.
• Teach it: drag an email into _Mail2ERP/QUOTATION or _Mail2ERP/ORDERS to retry it as that type, or into _Mail2ERP/SKIP to skip that kind of email in future.

📅 Unclear Emails and What Comes Next

Mail2ERP reads PDF, Excel, Word, CSV, HTML, images and scanned documents with OCR — in any language, with no templates.

• Imported: the email moves to _Mail2ERP/PROCESSED and the sales order is open in Zoho, ready for packing.
• Unclear: the email stays in your INBOX, unread, with the reason in the log — for example a sender who is not a customer or a code that matches no item. Fix it in Zoho and drag the email into _Mail2ERP/QUOTATION or _Mail2ERP/ORDERS to retry.
• Uncertain quantities are skipped, never guessed, and you are asked to add them by hand.
• Packing and invoicing: choose an option of the reporting tag BOTS4.me (Full or Partial) on a sales order and AutoERP creates the package and shipment in Zoho Inventory and the invoice, and Zoho emails your customer. AutoERP deliveries need Zoho Inventory in the same organisation, and reporting tags need Zoho Books Standard or higher.

The platform is EU-hosted, built for GDPR and offers 2FA; reports, logs and mailbox folders come in 31 languages.

📚 Related Reading

• Features and plans: Mail2ERP product page and the Mail2ERP guide.
• Packing, shipping and invoicing: the AutoERP guide.
• Accounting-only systems: QuickBooks Online estimates from email and Xero quotes from email.
• Comparing options: Parseur, Docparser or Nanonets vs Mail2ERP.
• Keeping stock right: the AutoSTOCK guide.

🔗 Sources and Further Reading

Official documentation referenced in this guide. External links open in a new tab.

• Zoho Inventory Help — Packages
• Zoho Inventory Help — Shipments