Notes from building SideQuest Automation. New posts when there's something worth saying.
QBO ships no inbound PO automation. Distributors solve it five ways: manual typing, Zapier glue, OCR services like Conexiom, ERP migration, or purpose-built tools. Costs and limits broken out by PO volume so you can match the fix to your shop.
SideQuest v0.15.22 ships a self-contained dashboard. Thirteen metrics for distributors automating POs into QuickBooks Online. Time saved, top unmatched parts, customer concentration, month-end forecast, AR aging — none of which QuickBooks Online surfaces. No SaaS, no auth, no data leaves the box.
A wholesale distributor processes 40 POs a day from Gmail. The honest end-to-end workflow in 2026 — no Zapier, no Conexiom, no 6-week implementation. Where the obvious tools fall apart, the morning routine that replaces them, and the math vs. typing it yourself.
30% of an industrial distributor's POs are scanned PDFs. Fax-quality images, bordered tables, handwritten edits. The trust gate, vision passthrough, and the 4% tail that no OCR will ever read — the honest numbers from a 270-PO sample.
QuickBooks Online doesn't have a customer-cross-reference field on items. The single biggest source of friction in distributor PO automation. The auto-learning loop, partial-SKU matching, and why the alias table belongs outside QBO.
A buyer types "6 inch brass elbow." A second rep at the same shop sends "1/2 ft brass elbow." Same catalog item, two phrasings the matcher used to treat as different. v0.15.8 normalizes every common unit (inches, feet, mm, kg, gallons, miles) so customer phrasing translates to your catalog regardless of how they wrote it.
A distributor with 30 overnight POs spends 90 minutes every morning typing line items. SideQuest v0.15 ships one command that handles the clean ones for you and stacks the rest in a single review queue. The morning becomes size-independent.
Anthropic shipped Claude for Small Business with a native QuickBooks connector. We use Claude every day. Several customers asked the obvious question: why pay for SideQuest now? The Anthropic feature is the platform we sit on, not the thing we replace. Side-by-side of what each does.
Per-page price, accuracy on bordered tables, real numbers. Azure Document Intelligence primary at $0.01/page, Claude Sonnet 4.6 vision as a rescue pass for the 10% of pages OCR can't read cleanly. Shipping in v0.10.0.
Your reps catch orders on customer visits. Today those orders get re-typed at the office. With a templated email a rep sends from a phone, the draft Estimate lands in QuickBooks before the rep leaves the parking lot. No mobile app to install.
Intuit shipped an official QuickBooks connector for Claude. Customers ask if SideQuest still has a role. Short answer: yes, install both. Here is who does what.
If you hit a 3200 error or "Login required" from the QB API, your refresh token died. Three causes, one fix, ninety seconds. The exact recovery path.
Every founder I know told us to build a SaaS. We did the opposite. The reason matters if you're a distributor evaluating a tool that wants to see every PO you receive.
We ran 270 real industrial-distributor POs through three off-the-shelf OCR services. About 30% came back unusable. The five shapes that cause it, and what we built.
The free tier gives you 20 POs/month with no credit card. The exact playbook our evaluators use to know if SideQuest works on their messiest customer's POs in about an hour.
Your bigger customers send EDI 850 purchase orders. Their VAN drops the file in your email. The workflow we use to wire that into SideQuest without a full EDI integration.
Today's PO landed in Gmail at 1:39 AM. A scanned image from a customer not yet in QuickBooks, with two SKUs the catalog had never seen. Forty-five seconds later, Estimate 1001 was live. Here's the minute-by-minute.
If you run a distributor on QuickBooks Online and your team is still typing every PO from scratch, you have a $50,000 problem hiding in a spreadsheet you haven't built yet. The math, the template, and the four-week plan.
Honest expectations-setting. The first 10 POs through SideQuest are slower than what you're used to. By PO 50 the workflow is faster than anything you've done. Here's why, and how to compress the curve.
A Google OAuth client secret for our Gmail integration leaked to a public repo this morning. Live for 36 hours. The minute-by-minute timeline of the rotation, and what we changed to keep it from happening again.
Claude can do all the work to draft an Estimate. We let it. We don't let it press Send. The cost of a bad QB record is shipping cost and accounting cleanup. The cost of an unsent draft is twenty seconds of friction. The two are not comparable.
The handwritten PO is the test case nobody wants to talk about. Phone photos, faxes, pen-corrected scans. Here's how the vision pipeline handles them, where it still trips, and the cost question we had to answer.
A 12,500-POs-a-year distributor burns 970 hours typing line items into QuickBooks. That's $63k at $65/hr fully loaded. The dollar figure is the small part of the story. The real cost is who has to do it.
Get the SKU mapping wrong and nothing else matters. Four match paths in order of confidence: exact SKU, cross-reference, description-only, unmatched. How each one works and what to do with the output.
Three weeks shadowing inside-sales reps at four industrial distributors taught us where the typing tax actually lives. It is not the typing. It is who has to do it.