It is sell-side. The document arrives from a customer who wants to buy something, and the output is a sales order in your system.
This is routinely confused with purchase order automation, which is buy-side: a company automating the purchase orders it issues to its own suppliers, usually as part of procurement or accounts payable. The two categories share vocabulary and almost no software.
The confusion is not academic. Searching for purchase order automation software returns procurement platforms, because that is what most searchers mean. A distributor looking to stop re-keying customer orders is looking for sales order automation or order entry automation.
Why it matters on an order desk
If you evaluate a procurement tool expecting it to process inbound customer orders, it will not fit and the reason will not be obvious for several calls.
Related terms
- Order entry automationOrder entry automation is software that removes the manual keying step between a received customer order and the order record in an ERP, typically by extracting the document, matching its lines to catalog items, and producing a reviewed order.
- Purchase orderA purchase order is the document a buyer issues to commit to a purchase — so the same document is a purchase order to the customer who sends it and becomes a sales order to the distributor who receives it.