Orders that arrive by email and get copied by hand into the management system

15/09/2026

A customer sends an email with what they want to order: a list of items, some quantities, sometimes a delivery date. That email lands in a shared inbox that also gets supplier invoices, job applications and assorted notices, and someone has to find it, read it, and open the management system to enter the order: customer, items, quantities, price if it isn’t the standard one, and confirm there’s stock or it can be delivered in time.

Once the order is entered, someone has to reply to the customer confirming it’s been received and when it will arrive. If the email is ambiguous — a misspelled reference, a quantity with no unit, a “the usual” that doesn’t say what the usual is — someone has to write back and ask, then wait for the answer before moving on. This happens several times a day, mixed in with other work, which is exactly why it feels like background noise instead of a process with a cost of its own.

Where the time goes with orders by email

The first cost is finding the email among everything else landing in the same inbox, and deciding who handles it so two people don’t end up entering the same order twice. The second is the copying itself: moving customer, items and quantities from the text of an email into the fields of the management system, with no form to enforce the format and no warning from the system that an item doesn’t exist until someone tries to save it. The third is clarifying: orders with incomplete or contradictory details that stall the process until the customer replies, and that someone has to remember to pick back up once they do. The fourth is the confirmation reply itself, which often retypes by hand the same information that was just entered into the system.

The result is a process that keeps getting interrupted — open the email, switch to the system, go back to the email — and rarely happens in one go. Every interruption costs more than the sum of its parts, and no stopwatch captures that part.

The four figures for orders by email

Here a case is one order: from reading the email to it being entered in the system with the customer’s confirmation sent back. The frequency is almost always daily, because orders don’t wait for a weekly batch the way invoicing can, and the duration hides in the clarifying: a clear order gets entered in a minute, but the average climbs as soon as you count the ones that need a question sent back.

Say a small business gets orders by email every working day: 18 orders a day, 6 minutes per order — reading the email, entering it into the management system and replying to confirm — with someone whose hour costs €19. That’s 4,500 orders a year, 450 hours, and around €8,550 a year.

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What gets automated first in orders, and what still needs judgment

The first thing to automate is reading and copying: a form of your own, or an integration that reads the email and recognises the customer, the items and the quantities, avoids typing the same data twice and turns a clear order into a quick check instead of a full copy job. The confirmation reply also lends itself to a template, because the information it carries — what was ordered, when it arrives — comes straight from what has already been entered.

What still needs judgment is the order that doesn’t fit: the item that isn’t in the catalogue, the quantity that’s more than what’s in stock, the customer asking for terms that don’t match their account. Someone still has to decide whether to fulfil it, adjust it or stop and ask, and that doesn’t change just because the rest of the process is automated.

What we won’t tell you about orders by email

What’s most often missing here is how long an order actually takes, because it happens between other tasks and nobody times it: “a few minutes” could be two or it could be ten, depending on whether something needs clarifying. Without a duration you’re reasonably confident about, the annual cost of this process comes out as not estimable instead of as a figure that sounds right but that nobody has checked. Counting the orders from one normal week, with a stopwatch or just by checking the timestamps on the emails, is the fastest way to get that figure.

If this is how orders reach you, describe it in Handmetric the way it actually happens: which inbox, which software, what happens when an order isn’t clear. Describe your process.