From scanned PO to QB Estimate in 45 seconds
Today's PO landed in the Gmail inbox at 1:39 AM Pacific. A scanned image, forwarded by a customer called Datamoto. Two line items: 10 Rollerblades at $123 each, 5 Gas Can Sunglasses at $90. Total $1,680. I ran it through SideQuest at 8:54 AM.
0:00 Asked Claude: list my incoming purchase orders and draft an estimate for the first one.
0:03 Claude pulled the inbox label, found the Datamoto email, parsed the PNG attachment. Returned: PO-01103, two lines, customer Datamoto.
0:08 Catalog match attempt. Both line SKUs (DM19012 and DM78123) returned unmatched against the QB sandbox catalog. Confidence 0.34 and 0.43. Claude flagged both for review.
0:12 Claude tried to find Datamoto as a customer in QB. Not there. Flagged for review.
0:15 Built a local draft with both lines flagged "needs SKU" and customer field blank. Attempted to submit to QuickBooks. QB API rejected because the customer reference was null. Draft stayed in local-review state. No half-baked record made it into QB.
0:20 Asked me how I wanted to resolve. Offered three options: map both lines to an existing "Services" item (fastest), create real items in QB for both SKUs (cleaner), or hold for manual review. I picked the middle option.
0:25 Claude drove the QB web UI via the browser MCP. Created two new Products and Services entries: DM19012 Rollerblade ($123) and DM78123 Gas Can Sunglasses ($90).
0:32 Created a new QB customer called Datamoto. Captured the customer ID (58) from the resulting URL.
0:38 Discarded the original draft. Re-built it with the new customer ID and new SKU mappings.
0:42 Submitted the new draft to QuickBooks via the API. QB accepted. Returned Estimate ID 145, doc number 1001.
0:45 Opened Estimate 1001 in the QB UI to verify. Subtotal $1,680.00. Customer: Datamoto. Both lines correct.
What happened in 45 seconds
The work that got done: parse a scanned PO, create two catalog items, create one customer, build and submit an Estimate. The work I did: type one sentence and approve one decision.
Most POs don't require new customers or new catalog items. The same PO from Datamoto next week would resolve in 8 seconds, because Datamoto and both SKUs are now in QB and the cross-references are seeded.
If you're a distributor running QuickBooks and burning 4 minutes per PO on data entry, this is the loop SideQuest gives you. Most of the value is the next 12,000 POs after this one.