Nobody should have to retype an order
Every day, in distribution businesses everywhere, people read a message and type what it says into another system. It is careful, skilled, thankless work, and it is the single largest use of human attention in the average order desk. ManualOut exists to end it.
The problem
Orders do not arrive as data. They arrive as messages.
A chef sends a voice note at 11pm when the kitchen closes. A store manager photographs a handwritten list between deliveries. A buyer forwards a PDF built on their own template, using their own product codes, in their own order.
None of that is data. It is language. And somewhere in your business, a person is reading it and typing it into an ERP — matching "12 ctn still water 500" to item code 40182, remembering that this account has a different price list, checking whether the order clears their minimum, working out which warehouse it ships from.
They are good at it. That is the problem. Because they are good at it, the cost stays invisible until you try to grow.
Why it is expensive
The cost is not the typing. It is everything downstream.
Order volume does not arrive evenly. It lands in the same two hours every morning, against a cutoff that does not move. So you staff for the peak and pay for the quiet hours, and the queue still only clears as fast as people can type.
Then there are the errors. Not many — a good order desk is accurate. But a wrong pack size becomes a short delivery, a credit note, a second trip, and a phone call from an account that is now watching your numbers. The mistake costs a hundred times what the keystroke did.
And the rules quietly stop being rules. Minimum order values, cutoff times, delivery charges: real on paper, checked by a person under time pressure. At 8am with sixty orders waiting, the minimum is not a policy. It is a suggestion.
Why nothing has fixed it
Every distributor has tried a portal. Most have quietly given up.
The logic is sound: give customers a form, get structured data, delete the problem. It works for exactly the accounts that were nearly compliant anyway.
It fails everywhere else, because a portal is efficient for you and slow for your customer. They have to log in, search, add to cart, check out. Or they can send three lines of text. When one route takes thirty seconds and the other takes five minutes, they choose the fast one. That is not stubbornness. It is arithmetic, and you would do the same.
And you cannot force it. You can push your smallest accounts onto a portal. You cannot push your largest ones, because they have leverage and they know it, and nobody drops a major customer over the order channel. So you end up running a portal and an order desk, and the desk still types.
EDI has the same shape. It reaches your ten biggest accounts because those accounts made you build it. The independents, the cafés, the forecourts — the long tail where most of your order lines actually live — will never be on EDI.
What we built
Stop trying to change the customer. Change your side.
The useful question is not how to make customers order differently. It is how to take the order exactly as they sent it and still end up with clean data in your ERP.
That is harder to build. It is much easier to sell, because nobody outside your business has to agree to anything, learn anything, or log in to anything. Your accounts keep ordering the way they always have, and your order desk stops typing.
So ManualOut reads the message — email, WhatsApp, PDF, spreadsheet, voice note. It pulls out the lines and matches them to your product list. It applies your price lists, your minimums, your cutoff times, your warehouse rules. Then it creates the sales order in your ERP and tells you what it did.
When it is not sure, it says so, and a person looks. When your ERP rejects an order, that error lands in a queue as work rather than disappearing into a log. The goal is not to remove people from the order desk. It is to make sure the only orders reaching them are the ones that genuinely need a decision.
Order — Thursday delivery
Morning, For Thursday please: 12 ctn still water 500 8 ctn cola 330 6 ctn orange squash 1L 30 pcs salted crackers 10 ctn green tea 48 choc wafers Same delivery address as usual. Thanks, Priya
Same order, three channels, identical result. The original stays attached whichever way it came.
| Product | Unit | Qty | Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Still Water 500ml — 24pk | CTN | 12 | $100.80 |
| Cola Classic 330ml — 24pk | CTN | 8 | $89.60 |
| Orange Squash 1L — 12pk | CTN | 6 | $87.00 |
| Salted Crackers 200g | PCS | 30 | $49.50 |
| Green Tea 250ml — 12pk | CTN | 10 | $98.00 |
| Chocolate Wafer 45gTwo products match this name — needs a decision | PCS | 48 | $34.56 |
- Order value
- $459.46
- Minimum
- $750.00
- Status
- Under minimum
Six lines, one unmatched, and the order is short of this account's minimum. Both reach the desk as decisions rather than typing.
Who it is for
Three people have to agree before anything changes
Order automation gets evaluated by the desk that lives in it, the sales lead who owns the accounts, and the IT manager who has to connect it. It has to be worth their while separately.
For the order desk
The queue stops being a pile of typing and becomes a short list of decisions. Clean orders go through untouched. You handle the shortage, the unmatched line, the order below minimum — the parts that actually need judgement.
For sales
Your accounts never have to change how they order, so you never have to have that conversation. And once every order is structured, you can finally see what is selling, to whom, and which accounts have gone quiet.
For IT
No rip and replace. ManualOut sits in front of the ERP you already run and writes into it through your existing setup. Every order carries a timestamped record from received to confirmed, so reconciliation stops being detective work.
Who we are
The company behind ManualOut
ManualOut is built and operated by TwinArcus Infolab Private Limited, a software company based in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India.
We build for food and FMCG distribution specifically, rather than selling a general-purpose document tool with a food page bolted on. Catch weight matters to a meat wholesaler and means nothing to a drinks distributor. Short code runs a dairy business and is irrelevant to frozen. The rules are the product, and the rules are different in every corner of this trade.
You can reach us directly at [email protected]. Questions about data handling go to [email protected].
Send us your worst order
A voice note. A photo of a notepad. A spreadsheet in your customer's codes. We will run it live and show you what ManualOut makes of it — including the parts it gets wrong.