Reps in the field can email orders straight into SideQuest.
If your outside sales reps capture orders during customer visits — on the warehouse floor, in a parking lot, at the counter — they can send those orders to SideQuest from a phone email. SideQuest treats them like any other inbound PO: parses the lines, matches the parts against your QuickBooks catalog, builds a draft Estimate. The order desk reviews and submits. Nothing new to install. No mobile app. Works today with the SideQuest setup you already have.
What's actually different from a normal PO flow
Nothing on the back end. SideQuest already reads any labeled email in your watched Gmail and turns the content into a draft Estimate. The "field-order workflow" is just a convention: a templated email body that reps fill in on their phone, sent to the same Gmail address SideQuest is already watching. The order desk sees these alongside inbound buyer POs in the same review queue.
The flow at a glance
Save the template
Rep saves the field-order email template to their phone Notes app once. Roughly 8 lines.
Fill on site
At the customer visit, rep copies the template, fills in customer + line items. Takes about 45 seconds for a small order.
Send to order desk
Rep emails the order to the office's dedicated SideQuest inbox (the same Gmail that processes buyer POs).
SideQuest parses
SideQuest sees the labeled email, extracts the lines, matches against QuickBooks, builds the draft Estimate. Usually under 60 seconds.
Desk reviews + submits
Order desk opens the draft in Claude, fixes anything the rep got loose on, submits to QuickBooks. Customer gets a confirmation the same day.
The field-order email template
This is the body reps copy-paste into a new email on their phone, fill in, and send. The header fields tell SideQuest who the customer is. The Lines block tells SideQuest what they want. Both are parser-friendly — the format is designed for the matcher's customer-format-recognition subscore to score high.
Tip 1 Save the template to your phone once
Copy the template above. Paste it into your phone's Notes app, give it a title like "SideQuest field order template," and pin it. From that point on, opening Notes → tap the template → Copy → paste into a new email is about 5 seconds.
- iPhone Notes: Paste, tap the three-dot menu on the note, tap "Pin Note."
- Gmail iOS / Android: Save as a template under Settings → Templates if available, or just keep it in Notes.
- Outlook iOS / Android: Outlook's "My Templates" add-in works on mobile too.
- Power user move: Save it as an iOS Text Replacement (Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement). Type a shortcut like
;poand the whole template expands. Works in any app.
Tip 2 The Lines format is what makes the matcher work
Keep the qty × PN — description shape on each line. The matcher handles a lot of variation, but the cleanest, fastest matches come from this shape:
- Qty first, integer. "3", not "three" or "a few." Decimals OK for cut-to-length goods.
- × or x between qty and PN. SideQuest tolerates both, plus a plain space.
- PN second. Whatever ID your QuickBooks catalog uses. If you don't remember the PN, write the customer's part number — the matcher can use your cross-reference table.
- — or - or : between PN and description. Description is optional but helps the matcher confirm it picked the right SKU.
Don't have the PN? Just write the description: 3 × Brass elbow 3/4 NPT. The matcher will fuzzy-match against descriptions in your catalog. It'll flag the line for review if the match isn't confident — the order desk decides.
Tip 3 Set up your office Gmail filter once
For SideQuest to see a field-order email, it needs to land in the right Gmail with the purchase-orders label. Two ways to make sure that happens:
- Send straight to your SideQuest-watched Gmail. If your reps send field orders to the same Gmail address SideQuest already watches (e.g.,
[email protected]), the existing label filter applies automatically. - Send to your real orders inbox, and let the existing forward + filter handle it. If your reps email your normal customer-facing
[email protected]address, the forwarding setup you already have (per Outlook or cPanel guides) routes it to the SideQuest Gmail and labels it the same way.
Tighter filter, optional. If you want field-order emails to land on a distinct label (say, "field-orders") so the desk can sort them separately, add a Gmail filter: Subject contains "Field Order" → Apply label "field-orders" + "purchase-orders". SideQuest reads both labels the same way.
Who this is for
Outside sales reps
You're at customer sites all week and orders happen mid-conversation. Today those orders either go on a paper pad and get re-typed at the office, or get texted to the order desk and re-typed. With SideQuest, you email it once and it's in QuickBooks as a draft before you're back in the truck.
Inside sales reps doing counter sales
Walk-in customers, will-call pickups, phone-in orders. Same template, same email, same draft pipeline. Faster than handwriting a sales ticket and walking it to a data-entry person.
Branch managers covering for a sick rep
You don't know the rep's catalog cold, but you can read the customer's spec sheet and email the order in. SideQuest's fuzzy matching + your cross-reference table do the heavy lifting on the part IDs.
Owners who still ride along
If you're the founder who occasionally drives the truck or sits at the counter, this gives you a no-thinking-required way to capture an order without bothering anyone in the office.
What the order desk sees
From the order desk's perspective, a field-order email looks just like any other inbound PO. They open Claude Desktop, ask "list incoming POs," and the field order shows up with the rep's name in the From field instead of a buyer email. The lines are matched, the variances are flagged, and the draft Estimate is ready to review. Difference from a buyer PO: the rep is more likely to need a fix (typed on a phone in a noisy showroom) so the desk treats it with the same hand-edit-then-submit muscle they already use for less-than-perfect buyer POs.
If the rep skipped the PN and only wrote a description, the matcher fuzzy-matches and flags the line for review. The desk picks the right SKU from a suggested shortlist and clicks Submit. Total time from rep send → QuickBooks Estimate sent: often under 5 minutes during business hours.
FAQ
Does the rep need a SideQuest account or login?
No. The rep is just sending an email from their normal work address. SideQuest is on the receiving side. The only setup is on the office's side (their Gmail filter + SideQuest install). Reps don't install anything.
What if the rep types a price or doesn't?
Both work. If the rep types a price, SideQuest treats it like a buyer-supplied price and runs the usual variance check against your QuickBooks list price. If the rep skips price, SideQuest uses the QuickBooks default price for that item. Whichever happens, the order desk sees the variance flag (or absence of one) before submitting.
What if the rep types a customer name that doesn't exactly match QuickBooks?
Fuzzy matching handles small differences ("Acme Distribution" vs "Acme Distribution Inc."). If SideQuest can't confidently identify the customer, it flags the draft with customer_qb_id empty and the order desk fixes it before submit. SideQuest never auto-creates a customer record.
Can a rep send the order from their personal Gmail?
Yes if you trust the rep's identity from their email. Most distributors restrict it: only emails from a known internal domain (yourcompany.com) get the field-order label. The Gmail filter that applies the label can match on the From: domain to lock this down.
Can we let the rep see the draft Estimate before the order desk submits it?
Not directly through SideQuest today — Claude Desktop is the review surface. But the order desk can copy the draft into a reply email to the rep ("Here's what I'm about to submit, anything off?") in 15 seconds. A formal in-app rep view is on the v0.11+ wishlist; tell us if it'd unlock a deal.
What if the rep's phone has no signal at the customer site?
Standard email queueing handles this. The email sits in the rep's outbox; the moment signal comes back, it sends, and SideQuest sees it. From the order desk's view it just lands a few minutes later than it would have. No "did the order go through" anxiety.
Does this work for distributors on QuickBooks Desktop?
Yes. SideQuest's QBD beta (v0.9.0+) uses the same email pipeline. The only difference is that the QBD bridge writes to QuickBooks Desktop on Windows instead of QuickBooks Online via REST. Field-order emails get processed identically. See the QBD beta page for setup.
How does SideQuest know it's a field order vs a buyer PO?
It doesn't, and it doesn't need to. The processing pipeline is the same. If you want to track field orders separately in your reporting, add a Gmail filter that applies a second label ("field-orders") to anything with "Field Order" in the subject, then ask Claude "show me my top items from field-orders this month" — SideQuest's reporting tools can filter by label.
What about commission tracking for the rep?
SideQuest stores the rep's email address (the From: line of the field-order email) on the draft. Your QuickBooks side has commission tracking; nothing in SideQuest replaces that, but the rep-identifier carries through so you can match commissions to the originating rep when reconciling. If you'd like more structured commission metadata in the draft, email [email protected] — it's a small feature add we'd consider for v0.11.