A customer emails: could you supply 20 units, ideally this week. So you open Exact Online, look up the customer, look up the item, retype the quantity and save the order. It is not hard work. It is just work nobody needs to do.
In this video we show how your AI assistant takes it over: it reads the message, finds the customer and the items, and creates the sales order in Exact Online.
What happens behind the scenes
The assistant goes through three steps, and each one can fail in its own way:
| Step | What happens | Where it goes wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Find the customer | By the sender domain of the email | Unknown sender, or two customers on the same domain |
| Match the items | From a description in the mail to an item code | The assistant picks the item that looks closest |
| Create the order | Sales order with lines and quantities | Quantity or unit copied incorrectly |
Finding the customer by sender domain
This is the handiest part and the least known. The customer search looks at more than name and customer code: it also searches email address and website. So you can search for company.com and the customer comes up, even when the mail arrives from purchasing@company.com and the record in Exact Online is named differently from the sender.
If that returns nothing, the assistant should stop. An order on the wrong customer costs more time than it saves, and you only find out at invoicing.
The instruction
It comes down to an instruction you write once. Feel free to copy this one:
Read the order in this email.
Find the customer in Exact Online by the domain of the sender address. If you find no customer, or more than one, stop and report it.
Look up the item for each requested line. If you cannot find an item you are certain about, do not create the order and report which line you could not place.
Create a sales order for the customer you found, with the items you found and the requested quantities.
Copy the requested delivery date if the mail states one.
Then summarise what you created: order number, customer, lines, quantities and total amount.
The two stop rules do the real work. Without those lines an assistant carries on with its best guess, and a guess inside a sales order is a mistake that gets expensive further down the process.
What stays with you
The order appears in Exact Online with status Open, like any other order. You review it, adjust the price or delivery date if needed, and ship or invoice. What disappears is the retyping; the judgement stays yours.
So always ask the assistant for a summary afterwards. That way you see at a glance whether the right customer and the right items were picked, without having to open the order yourself.
This one does need write access
Creating a sales order is a write action. By default a Ledger Botje connection is read-only: the assistant may look and calculate, but not create anything. For this workflow you switch on write access in your account, and that requires an Advanced subscription.
Searching for the customer and the items works fine with read-only. To try out whether the matching holds up, have the assistant only search and summarise what it would create. That works without write access and makes a good dress rehearsal.
Closing the loop
This workflow is one half; sending the order confirmation automatically is the other. Put them back to back and the whole run from incoming mail to confirmed customer happens without anyone retyping a thing:
- The order arrives by email.
- The assistant turns it into a sales order.
- A scheduled task sends the customer the confirmation.
The tool overview shows what else is possible. Not connected yet? The steps per assistant are on connect your AI assistant.