Best Sales Order Management Software
Don’t for one minute think that the order process is merely taking a product off the shelf and sending it to the customer. It covers warehouse coordination, inventory tracking, purchase order and invoice processing, and more. Done manually, it’s a slow, error-prone process. Sales order management software automates the process end to end, reducing the margin for error and keeping orders moving from placement to delivery without unnecessary delays.
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A practical guide for enterprise teams calculating the ROI of automation.
Receive a sales order. Deliver goods to customer.
Woah! There’s way more to it. And because there are so many steps involved, the possibility of snags in the process are increased. Slow order processing can lead to a customer experiencing late delivery. Delaying when you’ll get paid. This poor experience can prompt the customer to find another supplier.
Trust lost. Oops!
Avoid this catastrophe with sales order management software to automate the order to cash process end to end…
Table of Contents
What is sales order management?
Sales order management is the process of handling and organizing a sales order’s life cycle. Starting from a customer placing an order to delivery. Sales order management optimizes the order processing workflow, ensuring customers’ orders are completed accurately and efficiently. Sales order management steps include…
- Order placement – Customer places an order via an e-commerce website, sales representative, etc.
- Order verification – The order is checked – product/service specifications, pricing, quality, availability – and confirmed.
- Order processing – Processing the order includes inventory allocation, payment processing , and updating the status of the order.
- Inventory management – Product availability is confirmed and inventory levels are updated.
- Payment processing – Payment is processed and the status of the order is updated.
- Order fulfillment – The products are selected, packed, and shipped. The order status is updated to show progress, and shipping details are shared with the customer.
- Order tracking – Sales order management systems allow the customer and vendor to track the status and location of the shipment.
- Invoicing – Once the order has been completed, an invoice is generated and sent to the customer. It includes product/service details, prices, taxes, and payment instructions.
- Returns and exchanges – Should the customer wish to return or exchange a product, the system handles the request and updates the inventory, refunding/replacing the customer’s goods.
- Reporting and analysis – Reporting analyzes sales trends, tracks order fulfilment efficiency, late deliveries, etc.
To ensure customer satisfaction, sales order management has to be timely and accurate. A streamlined process helps maintain inventory levels, improves cash flow, and enables sales channel data-driven decision making.
What is sales order management software?
Sales order management software automates the order fulfillment process. Creating a frictionless process from order placement to delivery.
OMS software manages all order-related information, customer information, inventory, shipping, and payment. Sales order management software gives your real-time visibility of order status, inventory, shipping tracking, and more.
At enterprise scale, the requirements go further. You need a platform that can handle multiple entities, currencies, and geographies without creating data silos. It should integrate directly with your ERP so that validated order data flows through without manual intervention. And it needs a full audit trail, every action logged and retrievable, so your compliance and finance teams can access transaction records when they need them.
“61% of businesses using sales order automation exceeded revenue expectations in 2020.” HubSpot
How does sales order automation work?
Sales order management streamlines the process of receiving and processing orders in your system, by integrating with your existing tech stack – ERP system, accounting software, e-commerce website. It involves an automation platform that is triggered by events, such as a customer placing an order on your site. The platform then takes action across systems, data, and teams to achieve the end result.
Punctual delivery to the customer. Prompt receipt of payment.
A sales order automation platform can automate the following steps in your process…
Data validation
After the order is placed it has to be validated. The platform analyzes the data to confirm it’s accurate and complete, checking it against your business rules. Whether that’s approved supplier lists, product quantity limits, or pricing thresholds. Any order that doesn’t meet those rules is flagged for review before it moves further through the process.
Inventory check
Once the order has been validated, the platform confirms product availability in real time and automatically updates inventory numbers across your systems. This keeps stock levels accurate without any of your team having to manually reconcile figures, which matters when you’re processing high volumes across multiple warehouses or locations.
Fulfillment documents generated
Documents such as packing slips, delivery notes, and shipping labels are automatically created as soon as the order clears validation. This removes a manual step that’s easy to overlook during busy periods and ensures fulfillment teams always have what they need to move orders out the door on time.
Invoicing and payment
An invoice is automatically generated with the correct payment details and submitted to the customer without delay. Because the data has already been validated earlier in the process, the invoice reflects the order accurately, reducing the back-and-forth that comes with billing errors and disputed charges.
Integration with existing systems
Your automation platform connects with your current systems, CRM, ERP, and accounting software, pushing clean, validated data through without manual rekeying. Every team works from the same information, which makes reporting more reliable and removes the risk of decisions being made on figures that are out of date or inconsistent across platforms.
Exception management
Not every order will process without a flag. When the system encounters a document it’s uncertain about, whether that’s an unusual format, a missing field, or a figure that falls outside defined parameters, it routes it for human review rather than passing potentially inaccurate data downstream. This keeps your team in control of edge cases without pulling them back into routine processing.
Benefits of automating sales order management
It’s more than just saving time. Automating your sales order management process sprinkles benefits throughout your business.
Be ready to scale up when your company grows. Protect your brand reputation. Reduce employee churn.
Check out some of the benefits of sales order automation…
Improved accuracy and fewer errors
When orders are processed manually, errors don’t announce themselves. A transposed digit, a missing shipping detail, or an incorrect product code can move through your workflow undetected until it causes a late delivery, a billing dispute, or a compliance issue.
While the occasional mistake isn’t going to take down your company, when large volumes of documents are involved, errors can hit your business financially.
Having to redo an order, missing a shipping date, etc., will hit your reputation as well as your pocket. Low quality data will also contribute to miscalculations and poor decisions.
Automating your sales order process eliminates human errors. With constant monitoring for discrepancies improving the validation process.
Faster and more efficient
Processing speed is one of the most immediate gains from automation. Orders that previously took hours to move through validation, approval, and fulfilment can be processed in minutes, and the system runs around the clock, which means order volumes don’t dictate staffing levels.
With manual intervention reduced, your order processing workflow is streamlined. From orders verification and processing, to shipping and payment.
Real-time updates on order status, inventory levels, etc., enable better decision making. Your customers will also benefit from this improved efficiency. Deliveries will be punctual, if not early.
Improved customer experience
For enterprise customers placing large or recurring orders, reliability matters more than speed alone. They need to trust that what they ordered will arrive on time, invoiced correctly, with accurate documentation. Automation makes that consistency achievable at scale.
Automation helps process orders faster, with real-time workflow updates. Improving customer satisfaction as your business is seen to be reliable and trustworthy.
Automated sales orders improve the customer experience – CX – with status of delivery tracking, outreach emails to customers, and automatic reordering of products.
Real-time inventory management
Inventory errors are expensive. Overselling a product you don’t have in stock damages customer relationships. Holding excess stock ties up working capital. Real-time integration between your order management platform and inventory systems keeps those figures accurate as orders are placed and fulfilled, giving your operations team a reliable picture at any point in the day.
Historical data will help you manage stock levels and identify demand patterns, such as seasonal increases.
Cost savings
The cost reduction from automation isn’t limited to headcount. Fewer errors mean fewer corrections, fewer disputes, and fewer delayed payments. The time your team previously spent on data entry gets redirected to work that has a direct impact on revenue and relationships.
Accurate reporting and analysis
When your order data is captured and stored consistently, reporting becomes reliable rather than a manual exercise in reconciling figures from different systems. Your operations and finance teams can pull accurate data on processing times, fulfilment rates, and order volumes without chasing spreadsheets across departments.
This real-time data fuels informed decision making, to help your business adapt immediately to a shift in market conditions.
Scalable with growth
Manual processes have a ceiling. At a certain order volume, the only way to keep up is to add headcount, which brings onboarding time, training costs, and the same error rates at higher volume. An automated platform scales with demand, handling seasonal spikes or business growth without a corresponding increase in processing risk.
Automated sales order management processes accommodates an increase in orders. Working with an automated processing platform is essential for growing businesses.
Full compliance and auditing
Enterprise businesses operate under regulatory requirements that make accurate record-keeping non-negotiable. An automated platform logs every action in the order lifecycle, creating a transparent audit trail that your compliance team can access and present without having to reconstruct events manually.
Improved employee satisfaction
Repetitive manual processing is one of the fastest ways to lose good people. When your team spends the majority of its time on data entry, it’s not working on the tasks that require judgment, relationships, or strategic thinking.
Automation shifts that balance. Your team handles exceptions, manages vendor relationships, and works on higher-value priorities. Which in turn, improves retention.
Best sales order management software
The right platform depends on what you already have in place. Your ERP, your order volumes, the formats your customers use to send orders, and the complexity of your approval workflows all affect which solution will deliver the most value. The tools below cover different parts of the order management stack. Some businesses will use one, others will combine a specialist document automation platform with a broader ERP solution to cover the full process.
Rossum | AI document processing
Rossum’s AI document processing platform automates the full order lifecycle, from receipt to fulfilment, using a proprietary large language model trained on millions of transactional documents. It’s built for enterprise teams dealing with high document volumes, multiple formats, and complex approval workflows.
Orders arrive from multiple channels, email, EDI, shared drives, web portals, and scanners. Rossum captures and validates the data regardless of format, with no templates required. The platform learns from every correction your team makes, which means extraction accuracy improves continuously over time without manual reconfiguration.
For order management specifically, Rossum handles multi-channel order capture, intelligent validation against your business rules and master data, automated approval routing based on order value or customer tier, and exception flagging for human review. Real-time inventory data is shared across systems to keep stock figures accurate as orders are processed.
Rossum connects directly with SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Workday, and Coupa, pushing clean, validated order data into your downstream systems without the need to rekey. It’s an official SAP Certified Partner with a certified integration for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Customer results from Rossum’s order management platform include Morton Salt achieving 95% time saved per document and a 71% straight-through processing rate, allnex reaching 70% touchless order processing, and LAPP achieving 94.9% accuracy on AI-captured order data fields.
Features include…
- Template-free AI extraction supporting 276+ languages and handwriting
- Multi-channel order capture from email, EDI, scanners, shared drives, and web portals
- Cross-validation against master data, ERP systems, business rules, and third-party APIs
- Automated approval workflows with configurable auto-approve and auto-reject rules
- Exception handling with automated vendor notifications and AI-generated emails
- Real-time performance dashboards tracking errors, turnaround times, and straight-through processing rates
- Full audit trail and document archive for compliance
Take a look at our Bus Industrial Tools customer case study…
Bus Industrial Tools was looking to streamline and improve the purchasing power of its customers. The company’s rule-based data extraction solution was struggling when presented with documents in various styles. Receiving both EDI – electronic data interchange and PDFs.
Rossum saved the day and improved its order-to-cash workflow process. Reducing the workload and improving the customer experience. This partnership with Rossum brought about a saving of 80% of time previously spent on managing the order-to-cash process.
“Before learning about Rossum, I doubted that an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) software could deliver high-quality output without investing much effort at the deployment stage. Rossum proves the opposite. After a short set-up phase, we can now process our sales orders considerably faster, with much fewer errors and higher overall scalability. As a result, the team at Bus Industrial Tools now has more time to focus on important tasks instead of the repetitive input work.”
Thijs Engel, Business Intelligence specialist at Bus Industrial Tools
SAP Business One | ERP solution for growing business
ERP solution for managing your entire company.

Access SAP Business One at any time and anywhere.
SAP Business One is an ERP solution used by over 80K businesses across more than 170 countries. It covers sales order management, inventory, purchasing, financials, production, and reporting within a single system.
Recent updates include built-in analytics and user-defined queries within the web client, integration with Microsoft 365 including OneDrive and Outlook, and improved cargo tracking for businesses shipping across the EU. Electronic VAT reporting and country-specific compliance tools are available for over 50 countries.
Rossum is an official SAP Certified Partner with a certified integration for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, allowing businesses running SAP to import master data directly and automate document workflows within their existing infrastructure.
Features include…
- Sales order management and order-to-cash automation
- Real-time inventory and financial reporting
- Web client built on SAP Fiori with advanced analytics
- Integration with Microsoft 365 and SAP Business Technology Platform
- Electronic invoicing and VAT compliance tools for 50+ countries
- On-premise, cloud, and hybrid deployment options
- Native mobile apps for iOS and Android
QuickBooks | Cloud accounting and invoicing
Automate your invoice processing.

Create customized invoices, estimates, and sales receipts to represent your brand.
QuickBooks is a cloud-based accounting platform used by small and growing businesses across more than 145 countries. It handles invoicing, expense tracking, inventory management, bank reconciliation, and financial reporting. Recurring invoices can be scheduled and sent automatically, and the platform supports real-time tracking of outstanding and paid invoices.
QuickBooks connects with a wide range of third-party apps including ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, eBay, and BigCommerce. It’s available across web and mobile and supports multi-currency payments.
Features include…
- Automated invoicing with scheduling and batch sending
- Real-time inventory tracking with low-stock alerts
- Multi-currency support across 145+ countries
- Bank feeds and automatic reconciliation
- Integration with ecommerce, payment, and time-tracking apps
- Mobile access via iOS and Android
Sales order management FAQs
A sales order is a document generated by a business after it receives a customer request to buy goods or services. It includes the details of the order, items, quantities, prices, delivery terms, and payment instructions.
Sales order management is the business process of handling customer orders for goods or services. It covers the lifecycle of a sales order, from creation and verification to processing, invoicing, fulfillment, shipping, and payment.
Frictionless sales order management ensures accurate and timely completion of customer orders. Helping businesses to optimize inventory control, reduce errors, enhance customer satisfaction, and improve overall operational efficiency.
Automation of the sales order management process increases efficiency, reduces errors, improves customer satisfaction, provides real-time inventory updates, lowers costs, automates reporting and analysis, and ensures compliance with regulations.
Enterprise businesses receive orders through multiple channels simultaneously, EDI, email, PDF, web portals, and sometimes still by fax. A capable platform captures and processes orders regardless of format, standardizing the data before it enters your ERP or order management system. This removes the need for manual reformatting and reduces the risk of channel-specific errors creating downstream problems.
The most common metrics are processing time per order, error rates, cost per transaction, and the volume of orders processed per head. Beyond those operational metrics, businesses also track downstream effects such as on-time delivery rates, customer satisfaction scores, and the number of disputes or billing corrections raised. Establishing a baseline before implementation makes it easier to demonstrate the return over time.
Eliminate sales order management inefficiencies
If you’d like to see how Rossum handles sales order automation and how we can transform your business operations, book a free demo today.