ℹ️ Note: To have purchase order OCR enabled for your team, contact your Customer Success Manager or reach out to [email protected].
Video walkthrough
Creating a Purchase Order from a Document Using OCR in Sutton
This walkthrough shows you how to turn a vendor purchase order into a draft purchase order in Sutton, with no manual entry required.
How to create a purchase order from a document
Go to Purchase orders in the left navigation panel.
Click + New purchase order in the top right
Then select Upload from the dropdown.
In the Create purchase order from documents modal, drag and drop your file into the upload area, or click browse to select it from your computer. Sutton accepts PDFs, photos, and other file formats.
Once you see Upload complete, click Create draft purchase order.
Sutton reads the document and matches its contents to your data. This usually takes 2–10 minutes. You can close the modal and keep working while it runs.
To check on your upload, click the robot icon in the top right. A notification badge appears while documents are processed. This panel lists every document you have uploaded through OCR, for both sales orders and purchase orders.
When a document shows a green checkmark, click View draft purchase order to open it. Documents that fail show an error and a reason, such as multiple orders in one file or a vendor Sutton could not match.
Review the details Sutton extracted, including vendor, shipping and billing information, line items, quantities, and costs, and adjust anything that is missing or needs tweaking.
Change the order status from Draft to Open and click Save.
📘 Sutton Tip: Sutton skips line items with no quantity, and only extracts the first 200 line items on large documents. Review the draft against the source file before changing the status to Open.
Your purchase order is ready
The draft has been promoted to an open purchase order, and you have skipped re-keying every line by hand. From here, the order behaves like any other purchase order in Sutton. You can receive against it, track shipping, or push it to QuickBooks Online if you’re connected.
📘 Sutton Tip: This same OCR workflow also works for sales orders. See Creating a Sales Order from a Document to turn a customer purchase order or invoice into a draft sales order.