Plainstep Orders

FORMAT & WORKFLOW GUIDE

Review a purchase order
against your product catalog.

A buyer sends two boxes of notebooks. Your catalog sells individual notebooks, with ten in a box. Entering “2” as the final order quantity would lose the packaging meaning. A purchase order review should check product identity, quantity, unit conversion and price together.

Try the sample order →

1. Prepare the two files

Use one customer purchase order and the corresponding merchant catalog. Work on a copy. Keep SKUs as text so leading zeros are preserved. Plainstep accepts files under 5 MB, up to 500 rows per file. It does not accept Excel workbooks; save as CSV UTF-8 first.

For purchase order CSVs, use these exact column names. UnitPrice is the price per unit as ordered: per BOX when Unit is BOX, per individual item when Unit is EA.

SKU,Description,Quantity,Unit,UnitPrice
NOTE-A5,A5 ruled notebook,2,BOX,25.00
PEN-BLUE,Blue ballpoint pen,20,EA,0.50

The catalog is one row per SKU. Its UnitPrice is the price per individual selling unit. PackUnit and PackSize explicitly define a pack. EA always means one selling unit. Use prices without currency symbols or thousands separators. This pilot supports USD and whole selling-unit results.

SKU,Product,UnitPrice,PackUnit,PackSize
NOTE-A5,A5 ruled notebook,2.50,BOX,10
PEN-BLUE,Blue ballpoint pen,0.50,BOX,20

Templates can be downloaded from the workspace. They contain fictional sample products; replace them with your own catalog.

2. Check product matches and pack sizes

Exact, case-sensitive SKUs match automatically. A description alone never selects a product. Choose the correct catalog SKU for an unmatched item after checking the source. There is no learned alias shared between customers.

For NOTE-A5, 2 BOX × 10 EA per BOX becomes 20 EA at $2.50 each. A box price of $25.00 agrees with this catalog. A different price stays flagged: check whether the order or catalog needs correcting, including customer-specific pricing. The pilot does not decide negotiated prices for you.

3. Confirm the source and export a reviewed CSV

Inspect every line and mark it checked. A changed quantity, price, unit or product clears that line’s approval. Replacing the catalog clears all approvals. Repeated SKU lines must be consolidated in the source before export in this pilot.

The optional source subtotal is the line-item subtotal before tax and shipping. If present, it must equal the reviewed line values. Confirm that all source lines are present and check your existing order system for duplicates, then download the draft CSV. The export retains original values, reviewed values and source line/page references.

This is a generic review CSV, not a Shopify import file or a created sales order. It does not calculate taxes, check historical duplicate orders or trigger payments or fulfilment.

Which PDF purchase orders work?

Download a fictional supported PDF and pair it with the catalog CSV template from the workspace.

For upright text PDFs with a single table per page and one text row per item, you can choose the table columns before importing:

  1. Select the header row and click “Suggest columns from this header”.
  2. Check the first and last item rows. Exclude headings, subtotals, taxes and terms.
  3. Assign each column: description or SKU, quantity and price per ordered unit are required. SKU and unit may be absent; you will supply those in the review.
  4. Compare the extracted preview with the page. Adjust the dashed column boundaries if needed. A boundary through text blocks that preview.
  5. Confirm every page, including pages without order items, then select “Use mapped lines”. Enter the buyer, PO number, currency and source subtotal before reviewing the products.

Suggestions are a starting point, not an accuracy guarantee. A line number is not a SKU, a vendor is not necessarily the buyer, and a line total is not a unit price. No product is selected from its description automatically. Missing units remain blank. A price of $1,200.00 becomes 1200.00; ambiguous number formats remain unchanged for review.

The fictional download also supports direct import when it retains all its template fields: Buyer:, PO:, Currency: USD, Declared lines: and Declared total:, with one of these headers:

Line | Code | Description | Qty | UOM | Unit price
or
Item | SKU | Product | Amount | Unit | Price

Declared total means the line-item subtotal before tax and shipping. Inconsistent counts or metadata in these templates are rejected. Up to ten pages and 500 imported item rows are supported.

Scanned PDFs have no readable text layer and are not supported. Wrapped item descriptions, overlapping columns, rotated pages or multiple tables per page need a prepared CSV. Column choices are not saved between uploads. We have checked three externally published IBM tutorial PDFs (13 item rows from one layout family), not customer documents or a representative accuracy benchmark.

Do files leave my computer?

The workspace processes files in your browser using locally served code. It does not upload them to an AI service or a server. Refreshing clears the current session, so download a report before closing. See privacy and limits.

Need help with a format? Ask a question using a description or invented example. Do not email customer documents without appropriate permission.