The questions we would
want answered.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions about purchase order automation

• When can we start using EmailOrderPilot?

  Not yet. EmailOrderPilot is being built by DevCraft and has no launch date published on this site. There is no signup form either — the only route right now is the contact flow at DevCraft, which is also where early-access conversations happen. We would rather tell you plainly that work is unfinished than imply a readiness we do not have.

• What file types can be processed right now?

  A purchase order arrives as an uploaded document: PDF, PNG or JPEG. That covers most real-world paperwork, including scans and photographs of a printed order. Reading directly from an email inbox or mailbox is planned but still under development, so it must be described as roadmap rather than something you could turn on this week.

• What happens to a scan with no readable text layer?

  It is parked, not guessed at. A page whose text cannot be read reliably does not get filled in with plausible values; the run stops at a review state carrying explicit issues that say what is missing. In practice that means someone looks at the original document instead of acting on invented line items. The trade-off is honest: some orders need a human sooner than an optimistic system would admit.

• How do I know an extracted quantity actually came from my customer’s document?

  Each extracted value is presented beside its source highlight — a pointer into the original document giving the page and character offsets — so verification is looking, not trusting. Facts that genuinely were not printed are left empty with an issue code attached rather than estimated. See how extraction and provenance work for the full walk-through.

• Does catalogue matching invent SKUs when nothing matches?

  No. Matching offers candidate products with alternatives listed and reports the method used (an exact tenant SKU, a customer-scoped alias, then a normalised identifier). When several candidates remain equally plausible the choice stays open. When nothing matches, the line carries an explicit unmatched flag. A confident invention is worse than an admitted unknown, because an invented SKU reaches your warehouse while a flagged line does not. That behaviour is described in more detail on the purchase order automation comparison.

• Can someone wave away a problem to get an urgent order out of the door?

  A blocking issue cannot be dismissed from the review screen. It needs a correction that makes validation pass, and each patch must name a field it is allowed to correct and cite text this document actually produced. Fields that hold a verdict — findings, whether a line blocks, computed totals — are refused outright. Urgency is handled by fixing the underlying fact, not by overriding a check.

• What exactly does approval bind to?

  One specific revision plus its content hash, recorded for an authorised reviewer who had no unresolved blockers. Approving does not export anything; exporting is a separate deliberate action on that approved revision. If you save a correction afterwards, that creates a new revision and any live approval on the earlier one is revoked. This sounds strict until the first time a draft changes after being signed off — then immutability is the thing that saves an argument.

• Which formats can an approved order leave in?

  CSV or JSON, generated only from an approved revision. Nothing exports without human approval, which means the pipeline never becomes a route for an unreviewed document into your system. The practical effect is described on the page written for suppliers: handover stays inside tools you already use rather than requiring a new platform to be adopted wholesale.

• Is our data separated from other companies using it?

  Yes, by design rather than by convention. Data belongs to one tenant and separation is enforced at the database level with row-level security and composite tenant keys, so identifiers alone are never treated as authorisation. Catalogue versions and validation policy versions are immutable snapshots pinned per run, meaning a result can be reproduced later against exactly the inputs it was produced from. An audit trail records who changed what and why.

• Does it handle South African currencies and units?

  ZAR is supported among the currencies the money handling accepts. Units are handled through explicit conversion rules published in your catalogue — a case pack converts only when a rule says so, never because “box” and “each” looked similar enough to assume. Quantities carry their unit of measure; prices keep decimal precision instead of floating rounding. If your paperwork uses unusual packing conventions, that is precisely where an explicit rule earns its keep. This site itself is priced nowhere yet: no plans or launch pricing have been published, because none exist to publish.