AI-Powered Order Form Parsing & Data Entry

Turn Any Order Into a Tracked Order with AI Parsing

Not every order comes through a clean e-commerce checkout. If you run a business that makes custom products, you probably know the reality: orders arrive as photos of handwritten forms from a craft show, forwarded emails with a list of items, PDF purchase orders from corporate buyers, or even text messages with "Can you make me three of those blue ones?"

Getting those orders into a tracking system has traditionally meant sitting down and typing everything in by hand. Customer name, address, items, quantities, special instructions -- it adds up fast. At 5 minutes per order, a stack of 20 forms from a weekend craft show eats up nearly two hours of data entry. And manual entry means typos, missed items, and transposed numbers.

TrackMy.Shop's AI order parsing eliminates that bottleneck. Upload a photo, paste an email, or drag in a PDF, and the AI extracts the order details into structured fields. You review and confirm, and the order lands on your Kanban board ready for production.

How AI Parsing Works

The process is simple from your side:

1. Upload or paste your order source. Take a photo of a paper form with your phone and upload it. Copy-paste the text of an email order. Drag a PDF purchase order into the upload area.
2. The AI reads and extracts. Within moments, the AI identifies the customer information, line items, quantities, addresses, and any special notes in the document.
3. Review the extracted data. TrackMy.Shop shows you exactly what the AI found, with each field editable. Nothing is committed automatically.
4. Confirm and save. Once you have verified the details (or made any corrections), save the order. It appears on your Kanban board in your first workflow stage, ready for production.

The AI does not require templates, pre-configured layouts, or any training on your specific forms. It adapts to whatever format your orders come in. Neatly typed purchase orders, handwritten notes on lined paper, rambling emails with order details mixed into the conversation -- it handles all of them.

What It Can Parse

Paper order forms (via photo upload): Snap a photo with your phone camera and upload it. The AI reads both printed and handwritten text. This covers everything from professional order forms with checkboxes and fields to a scribbled note on a Post-it. For best results, make sure the photo is reasonably well-lit and the text is legible to a human eye -- if you can read it, the AI generally can too.

Email orders (via paste): Copy the body of an email and paste it into the parser. The AI finds the order details even when they are buried in conversational text. An email that says "Hi, I would like to order 24 of the lavender soy candles and 12 of the cedar ones, shipped to my shop at 88 Main Street, Asheville NC 28801. Thanks, Dana" becomes a structured order with customer name, items, quantities, and shipping address.

PDF purchase orders (via drag and drop): Drag a PDF into the upload area. The AI reads the document structure, identifies tables of line items, extracts header information like PO numbers and addresses, and parses it all into order fields. This is especially useful for businesses that receive formal purchase orders from wholesale buyers, corporate clients, or government agencies.

Faxed or scanned documents: If you still receive faxes (and plenty of B2B businesses do), save the fax as a PDF or take a photo and upload it. The same parsing engine handles scanned documents with the same accuracy.

What Gets Extracted

The AI looks for and extracts:

• Customer name -- the person or business placing the order
• Contact information -- email address and phone number
• Shipping address -- street, city, state, zip, country
• Line items -- individual products or services being ordered
• Quantities -- how many of each item
• Product details -- colors, sizes, materials, customization notes
• Order notes -- special instructions, rush requests, delivery preferences
• PO or reference numbers -- any order identifiers from the customer's side

If the document contains information the AI cannot confidently identify -- say, a smudged phone number or an ambiguous abbreviation -- it flags those fields with lower confidence so you know to double-check them.

Confidence Scoring and Review

This is an important part of the workflow: you always have the final say. The AI does not create orders silently. After parsing, you see a review screen with every extracted field displayed. Each field shows a confidence indicator so you can quickly scan for anything that might need correction.

High-confidence fields -- a clearly printed customer name, a straightforward item list -- are ready to go. Lower-confidence fields -- a partially illegible handwritten note, an unusual product description -- are highlighted so you can verify or correct them before saving.

This review-before-save approach means the AI speeds up data entry without sacrificing accuracy. In practice, most fields parse correctly and the review takes just a quick scan. For the occasional field that needs correction, you just click and edit.

Real-World Scenarios

Craft show orders: Sarah makes handcrafted pottery and sells at weekend craft shows. Customers fill out paper order forms for custom pieces -- choosing glazes, sizes, and personalization. On Monday morning, she used to spend an hour typing those forms into a spreadsheet. Now she photographs each form with her phone, uploads the batch to TrackMy.Shop, reviews the parsed data, and every order is on her production board in minutes. She estimates it saves her 30 to 45 minutes per show.

Emailed purchase orders: A small apparel decoration business receives orders from local schools, sports leagues, and businesses via email. Some send formal PO documents attached as PDFs. Others just write out what they need in the email body. Both formats feed into the AI parser -- PDFs get dragged in, emails get pasted -- and the result is the same: a clean, structured order ready for production.

Faxed wholesale orders: A specialty food distributor still receives orders by fax from some long-time restaurant clients. The faxes are often low-quality scans of handwritten order sheets. Previously, someone had to decipher each fax and type the order into the system. Now, the fax gets saved as a PDF (most modern fax services do this automatically), uploaded to TrackMy.Shop, and the AI handles the transcription. The team reviews for accuracy and saves -- a process that takes a fraction of the time.

Mixed-format orders from the same customer: Some businesses deal with customers who order differently every time. One week it is an email, the next it is a phone call followed by a texted photo of a handwritten list. TrackMy.Shop handles all of these through the same AI parsing workflow, so your production board looks consistent regardless of how the order arrived.

Tips for Best Results

• Good lighting matters for photos. Natural light or a well-lit room produces much better results than a dim photo with shadows across the text.
• Flatten wrinkled paper before photographing. Creases can obscure text and reduce parsing accuracy.
• Crop out irrelevant background. If you are photographing a form on a cluttered desk, crop the image to just the form before uploading.
• For emails, paste the relevant portion. If there is a long email thread, just paste the message that contains the order details rather than the entire chain.
• Use the confidence indicators. Get in the habit of glancing at the confidence levels during review. A quick scan takes seconds and catches the occasional parsing error before it becomes a production mistake.
• Handwriting legibility helps. The AI is remarkably good at reading handwriting, but very messy handwriting will naturally have lower confidence. If you provide order forms at craft shows, consider forms with clear labeled fields to guide your customers.

Getting Started

AI order parsing is available on TrackMy.Shop's Team plan ($34.99/month, up to 250 orders) and Enterprise plan ($99.99/month, unlimited orders). There is no per-parse fee -- parsing is included in the plan. Once enabled for your workspace, the feature is available from your order creation screen. Upload your first order form, paste your first email, or drag in your first PDF, and see the AI extract the details in seconds.

Combined with custom workflow stages, barcode scanning, and branded customer tracking pages, AI order parsing means you can go from a handwritten note on a napkin to a fully tracked, customer-visible production order in under a minute. That is time back in your day to focus on the work that actually makes money -- making your products.

If you are on the Free or Starter plan and want to try AI parsing, upgrading to Team unlocks it along with higher order limits and additional team seats.