SideQuest for foodservice distributors on QuickBooks Online
If you supply restaurants, schools, hospitals, or institutional kitchens, your inbound orders come in three flavors. A single-unit independent restaurant texts a list of items into an email and hits send. A multi-location chain sends a formal PO from their HQ procurement system, one PDF per delivery date per location. An institutional kitchen attaches a spreadsheet from their food management software. SideQuest reads all three out of your Gmail label, applies contract pricing, builds the draft Estimate, and lands it in QuickBooks before the route cutoff.
What changes for you
Daily order entry stops eating the morning
The orders that landed overnight are pre-parsed by the time your order desk arrives. Customer, ship-to location, requested delivery date, contract pricing all populate in the draft Estimate. Your CSR confirms instead of types.
Chain-account contract pricing applies automatically
Big regional chains negotiate item-level pricing. Upload the customer cross-reference (Solo tier and above) and SideQuest applies the contract price on every PO from that account — flagging variance if the buyer accidentally typed catalog price. Walk-up independents stay on catalog.
Case vs each disambiguation runs on your catalog setup
If your QuickBooks catalog carries both the case SKU and the each SKU for a product, SideQuest reads the customer's wording — "2 cases" lands on the case SKU, "6 each" lands on the each SKU. No uom model imposed; we match against what you've set up.
Why this fits foodservice
Catalog quirk: descriptors carry the spec
"Ranch dressing #10," "ground beef 80/20," "Romaine hearts 24-count" — your catalog item names are full descriptors. The matcher reads both your SKU and your description, plus what the customer wrote. So "ranch 1 gal" finds "Ranch Dressing #10" even without a part number on the line.
Route-day deadlines are the real constraint
The order entered by 4pm ships tomorrow morning. Late orders slip a day. SideQuest moves the bottleneck off your CSR's typing speed, which means a 2pm flood of orders still gets entered in time for the cutoff. We don't manage routing or delivery scheduling — your dispatch software does that. We stop the typing from being the gate.
Credit terms vary by customer class
Chain accounts run net-30 with credit limits. Independent restaurants get net-7 or COD. School and hospital institutional accounts run on PO-based net-45 with PO-required-on-invoice. SideQuest's Customer Risk Gate reads QuickBooks Customer.Balance and overdue Invoices per account, flags credit-hold customers before the draft goes out, and lets you keep the terms structure you've already built in QBO.
Where SideQuest stops
We don't manage your routes, your fleet, your warehouse, or your perishable inventory turnover. We're the layer that reads inbound customer orders and creates the draft Estimate in QuickBooks. Your existing route planning, picking, and delivery flows run on whatever they run on today. We just stop your order desk from being the typing bottleneck between an email landing and an Estimate hitting QBO.
Start free
Free tier covers 25 POs per month, no credit card. Solo at $29/month covers 150 POs and unlocks chain-account contract pricing via the cross-reference upload. Setup runs about 30 minutes via the install prompt with Claude Desktop.
Start free See pricingFAQ
Can SideQuest handle case packs and broken-case orders correctly?
Yes if your QuickBooks catalog has both the case SKU and the each SKU. A line that reads "2 cases ranch dressing #10" resolves to the case SKU. "6 each ranch dressing #10" resolves to the each SKU. SideQuest matches against your catalog as you've set it up — we don't impose a uom model on top.
How does this work with route-day cutoffs?
The same way it works with any other PO. SideQuest reads inbound orders as they arrive in your Gmail label, parses, and drafts. Your order desk reviews and submits on whatever cadence matches your route schedule. We don't manage routing — that's your dispatch software's job. We just stop your CSR from typing the lines.
What about loose-format emails from independent restaurants?
Most independent operators don't send formal POs. They send something like "hey can I get 2 cases of romaine, 1 case 80/20 ground beef, and a tub of ranch by Friday." SideQuest's narrative parser handles those — it reads quantities and product mentions out of free-form text, matches each to your catalog, and surfaces matches for the CSR to confirm. The chain-account formal PO and the text-message-style note from a single-unit operator both flow through the same pipeline.
Keep reading
SideQuest for medical supply distributors
Clinics, hospital systems. GPO contract pricing, Excel attachments.
VerticalSideQuest for Jan-San distributors
Janitorial supplies for facilities, schools, healthcare. Case packs vs each.
VerticalSideQuest for auto parts distributors
Repair shops, fleet, dealer warranty. OEM/aftermarket cross-references.