P21 Order Entry, drafted from the POs your inside sales team already keyed.

A rep opens Order Entry, starts the order for the customer, picks the ship-to, types the PO number and adds the lines. Some POs answer a quote already sitting in P21. Others ask for items the branch doesn't have, so the rep chooses between a backorder, a direct ship from the vendor and a transfer from another location.

For the test, AI does that reading on copies of POs your team already keyed and drafts each order the way P21 holds it, header first, then each line with its disposition, giving a reason for every choice. It enters nothing in P21. Your reviewer then goes line by line, draft against order, and marks every field that differs.

The header: customer, ship-to, PO and taker. An order in P21 starts with the customer, then the ship-to, the customer's PO number and the taker, the rep who entered it. Customers sometimes want one order sent to a job site instead of their default ship-to, and Epicor's training shows that change made on the single order, along with one-time delivery instructions. When a PO says same as last time, reps reach for the Previous Requests tool to pull items off earlier orders. The draft picks a Ship To ID when the address matches one you export, marks job-site addresses and delivery notes as changes for this order only, and pulls repeat items from the order history you send.

Quotes live in the same window. P21 builds a quote in Order Entry, the window that holds orders, and a rep turns it into an order with Convert to Order on the right-click menu. Reps can also copy a quote from one customer to another, so near-identical quotes can sit under several accounts, and a PO that says per our quote has to be matched to the right one. The draft points to the quote it believes the PO answers, shows each line that drifted from it on item, quantity or price, and leaves Convert to Order to your rep.

Approval and credit hold come before the warehouse. Epicor's own videos describe two gates. A company can require that orders be reviewed and approved before the warehouse picks them or anyone invoices them. And when a customer goes on credit hold, every one of that customer's orders goes on hold too, until someone validates the open orders and stock is allocated again. Some P21 shops add business rules of their own on top, such as a manager's approval for certain product groups, and reps attach notes to the order header or a single line for the warehouse or billing to read. Each draft names the gate it would hit, and it carries the PO's instructions as header or line notes.

Short on stock: a PO, a transfer or a backorder. When the branch can't fill a line, P21 lets the rep act from Order Entry itself: create a purchase order to the vendor, or create a transfer from another location on the fly. Each line carries a disposition code; D, for example, marks a direct ship from the vendor. Which one your team picks turns on the customer, the date and the vendor, none of it printed on the PO. The draft suggests the disposition your team chose on similar lines in the sample, labels it as a suggestion, and never raises a purchase order or a transfer.

Prices, revised POs and what your reviewer watches. P21 prices a line from price pages, which reach a customer only through a price book in a price library, and each page can carry an effective date and an expiration date. A buyer quoting last quarter's number may be right about the past and wrong today, and reps check where a number came from in Sales Pricing Inquiry. Revised POs bring their own trap: canceling a line and deleting it differ in P21, and depending on settings a canceled item can still print on pick tickets and invoices at a quantity of zero. Your reviewer looks hardest at dispositions, ship-tos and dropped lines, because those reach the warehouse floor and the customer's invoice.

When the drafts meet the success criteria, the job runs on incoming POs for about 30 days.

A rep approves, edits or turns back every draft before an order exists in P21, and dispositions, purchase orders and transfers stay their call. Your P21 administrator decides how approved drafts get in: keyed by a rep, or brought in through import tools your company already has. The same scoring sheet stays in use for the month.