Save about $4 per PO. Pay $0.13.
SideQuest reads inbound POs from your email, matches lines to your QuickBooks catalog, and builds the draft Estimate. Type your monthly PO count to see your numbers. We assume 8 minutes saved per PO at a $30/hr loaded CSR rate; adjust either number if yours are different.
Real ROI is higher because this only counts labor time. It does not count error reduction, faster reply turnaround, or CSR retention.
Tiers
Free
Up to 25 POs / month
no card, no trial countdown
Parser, OCR, draft Estimate, manual submit. Real product on real POs.
Start freeSolo
Up to 150 POs / month
$0.19 per PO · ~20× ROI
Everything unlocked. Auto-submit, reply drafts, risk gate, quotes, cross-refs. Single user.
Start SoloGrowth
Up to 750 POs / month
$0.13 per PO · ~30× ROI
Solo plus 3 seats, per-customer learned rules, per-customer reporting.
Start GrowthScale
Up to 3,500 POs / month
$0.085 per PO · ~45× ROI
Growth plus 10 seats, catalog tuning by request, priority email support.
Start ScaleOver your monthly cap?
Soft cap: 20% over your tier in a given month is free; nothing breaks. Beyond that, $0.20 per extra PO. The connector tells you when you're approaching the cap so you can decide whether to upgrade or ride out the spike. If you regularly exceed your tier we'll proactively recommend the next tier up.
POs are the only meter
AR Assistant sweeps, reply drafts, quote drafts, and Insights reports are all bundled with every paid tier at no extra cost. Unmetered for normal usage. Run AR sweeps as often as you want and chase every customer in your QuickBooks file. Your PO count is what determines your tier.
Annual billing
Pay annually and get two months free. Solo: $290/year. Growth: $990/year. Scale: $2,990/year. Same overage handling, same features, same product.
What's in each tier
| Capability | Free | Solo | Growth | Scale |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PO intake and parsing | ||||
| Inbound PO parsing (Gmail / forward) | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| OCR for scanned and image POs | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Multi-doc attachment routing | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Customer cross-ref by email domain | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Matching | ||||
| QBO catalog match (PN exact + description fuzzy) | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Customer-specific cross-reference CSV upload | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Auto-learn cross-references from operator overrides | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Drafting and submission | ||||
| Draft Estimate built in SideQuest | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Manual submit to QuickBooks Online | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Auto-submit clean drafts to QuickBooks Online | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Reply drafts to buyer (in Gmail, you click send) | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Customer risk gate (credit limit + invoice aging) | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Quote workflow (RFQ classifier + pricing knobs) | — | ● | ● | ● |
| Operations | ||||
| Built-in reports (POs processed, top SKUs, match quality, time saved) | ● | ● | ● | ● |
| Per-customer reporting | — | — | ● | ● |
| User seats | 1 | 1 | 3 | 10 |
| QBD beta access | — | — | — | ● |
What auto-submit does (and doesn't do)
This is the single biggest source of confusion. Worth being explicit.
Auto-submit writes the Estimate into QuickBooks. That's it.
What it does: when a clean draft passes the clean-gate (all lines matched, no price variance, customer in good standing, no risk flags), SideQuest calls the QuickBooks Online API and writes the Estimate. The Estimate goes from "draft in SideQuest" to "Estimate in your QuickBooks Online file" without you clicking submit.
What it does NOT do:
- Send anything to your customer (no emails, no order confirmations)
- Email the order confirmation reply (separate feature, drafts in Gmail, you click send)
- Convert the Estimate to an Invoice or trigger fulfillment
- "Enter" data into any other system
If anything fails the clean-gate, the draft pauses for your review. Auto-submit is opt-in (you turn it on with an env var) and available on Solo and above. Full FAQ entry →
Common questions
How is this different from Conexiom, Esker, or Bill.com?
Conexiom and Esker target $50M+ distributors at $30K-$100K/year and up. They're great, just out of reach for the $1M-$30M QBO segment we serve. Bill.com does inbound vendor bills (AP), not inbound customer POs from your buyers, which is the opposite direction of paperwork. SideQuest is the only QBO-native option in the $0-$300/month band that actually handles inbound customer PO automation end-to-end.
Why is Free capped at 25 POs/month?
Enough to feel the value on real POs. Most QBO distributors do more than 25 inbound POs per month, so the cap is a soft nudge toward Solo. If 25 covers your real volume, stay on Free as long as you'd like; we'd rather have you using SideQuest than not.
Can I downgrade or cancel?
Yes, any time, from the billing portal. No annual contracts on monthly plans. Annual plans are pre-paid for the year. We don't auto-charge surprise overages without warning you first.
Do you take a percentage of the Estimates you process?
No. The price is the monthly fee. We don't take a cut of your sales.
Does SideQuest see my QuickBooks data?
No. The connector runs on your computer. Your PO content, your QuickBooks catalog, your customer list, your pricing: none of it leaves your machine. We see only counters (how many POs you processed, used for billing) and license validation pings. See privacy and security.
What if I'm on QuickBooks Desktop?
Same connector, beta on Windows. Same pricing. See QBD beta for setup.
Can I try it without installing?
Yes. The parser playground runs in your browser against any PO email or PDF you paste in. It uses the same parsing heuristics SideQuest runs in production, minus the QuickBooks matching layer. No signup, no install. If you like what you see, then start free.