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Orders from Email and Text for Kerridge K8

A contractor’s emailed or texted list read into an order draft with lines from K8’s product record, the job account and the delivery date, confirmed by your counter and entered as a sales order in K8.

Sales & estimatingUpdated Oct 202620 ERPs

See it work on K8.

Click through the steps. Fictional data, in K8’s terms; the real thing runs on K8.

Order queue · texted to the yard’s number
Illustrative
Tom Reilly, Harbor Point BuildersNew · 6:40 am

20 sheets 1/2 drywall, 40 2x4x8, 6 tubes subfloor adhesive, deliver Thursday to Maple St

Matched to Harbor Point Builders · HARB001 · job: Maple St duplex

Texted to the yard’s number, matched to the sender’s account and the job named in it.

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The problem, as it happens in K8.

A contractor texts the counter at 6:40 am: twenty sheets of half-inch, forty 2x4x8, deliver Thursday to Maple St. Someone reads it off a phone, finds each item in the product record, guesses which job account, and keys a sales order between walk-ins. The email version sits in one inbox until that person is back from the yard.

What goes wrong is quiet: the wrong 2x4 grade, the house account instead of the job, Thursday read as this Thursday. The ticket is corrected at delivery or on the invoice, and nobody counts how many orders started as a photo of a napkin.

How it works.

  1. 1

    The list comes in by email or text

    Forwarded to the order mailbox or texted to the yard’s number. Photos, attachments and the body of the message are read the same way; a model reads the list twice before anything is drafted. The counter sees it in one queue, oldest first.

  2. 2

    Lines are matched to your items

    Each line becomes an item line from the product record, down to the code: ‘half-inch drywall’ to the sheet you stock, with grade, length and unit. The sender is matched to the customer account and the job named in the message to its job account. Anything uncertain is flagged, not guessed.

  3. 3

    Delivery and terms are filled in

    The delivery date and jobsite from the message, the price level and terms from the account. A credit hold or a job past its limit shows on the draft before the counter opens it, not at the window.

  4. 4

    The counter confirms and enters it

    The draft opens with every match beside the original line. Fix a line, change the date, confirm. A person enters it as a sales order in K8, and the contractor gets a confirmation only when that person sends it.

How it connects to K8.

Lunica reads the product record, the customer account and job accounts through a read-only login to the K8 database: descriptions, units and pack sizes to match a texted line to a stocked item, the contacts and jobs on each account to find the sender, and the price level and terms to fill the draft. Order history tells it that this contractor’s ‘2x4’ has always been 248SPF.

Nothing lands in K8 without a person and nothing is sent on its own. The draft goes back as a K8 import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared; the counter confirms every line before that happens. The confirmation to the contractor is a draft until the counter sends it, and a message Lunica could not read is handed over as the original, not guessed at.

What a week looks like.

  • Every emailed and texted list in one queue, oldest first.
  • Lines matched to stocked items with grade, length and unit, not retyped.
  • The job account and delivery date on the draft before the counter opens it.
  • Orders entered by a person who checked them, not read off a phone between walk-ins.

Questions

Does it enter the order?

No. It drafts a sales order with every line matched; a person at the counter confirms it and enters it in K8, or imports the file where K8 takes one.

Does it write to K8?

No. Lunica reads the item and customer records and prepares the draft. The order goes in as a K8 import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared.

How does it get the texts?

A number under your name that contractors text. Email is a mailbox you forward to or give out. Both land in the same queue.

What if it can’t read a line?

The line is kept as written and flagged. The counter sees the original beside the draft and picks the item or asks the customer.

Will it confirm back to the customer?

It drafts the confirmation with the lines, date and address. The counter sends it. Nothing goes to a customer on its own.

What does the model see?

The message, its photo or attachment, and the items and account it is matching against. Not the whole product record.

Does it need a server?

Lunica runs on one server inside your network, or beside KCS’s hosted K8, set up and maintained by Lunica. It reads Kerridge K8 through a read-only login to the K8 database. There is no inbound connection from outside your network.

What does Lunica read in K8?

The customer account, open items and terms, purchase orders and receipts, the product record, quotes and order history, as each workflow needs them. Read-only, and only the rows a task is about.

Can it post to K8?

Nothing lands in K8 without a person. What belongs in K8 goes back as a K8 import where one exists, or keyed by your team from what Lunica prepared.

What about our documents?

Invoice copies and scans keep living in K8’s document management. Lunica reads them when a workflow needs one and never writes to them.

The same workflow, on another ERP.

Orders from Email and Text is written for every system on the list. You’re reading the K8 version.

See it on your K8 data.

Thirty minutes. We walk the workflow on K8 data, then map it to yours.