Reads the shared Inside Sales mailbox, extracts POs from attachments, and compares them against Business Central. Runs when you press Run, and every 4 hours while Unattended runs is on.
Purchase orders
Re-check BC — press it after Inside Sales has worked the list: an order keyed in, a price corrected, a date or ship-to fixed. It looks every purchase order below up in Business Central again using the same emails, and rewrites the rows, the counts and the workbook. Rows that stop needing action are shown as Cleared ✓ until you switch filters, so you can see a fix land.
| Why not just run it again? | A full run re-reads the mailbox. With unread only ticked, a message someone opened while working the list falls out of the window — the PO does not turn green, it disappears, which looks the same as fixed and is not. A re-check reuses the messages already read, so a row can only change because Business Central changed. |
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| What it does not do | It does not read the mailbox, spend anything on scanned attachments, or write to Business Central. It is a read, exactly like the one a run does. |
| What it will never clear | Read from a scan – verify has nothing to do with Business Central, so it stays however many times you press it — confirm it instead. The count is not meant to reach zero on its own. |
| If nothing changed | The figures come from a clone of BC that syncs on its own schedule, so an order corrected a moment ago may not have reached it yet. The line under the buttons says when BC was last checked. Give it a minute and press again. |
| Which runs it covers | All of them — the day window on screen is assembled from several reconciliations, and every one behind it is re-checked, not only the newest. |
One row per purchase order found in the mail window, checked against Business Central. Rows needing someone to act are shown first; switch the filter to see the ones that agree, which is how you confirm they were checked rather than missed. Click any row for the detail behind it.
Matching is on the customer's PO number against the sales header's External Document No., then archives, posted invoices, posted shipments and - for our own purchase orders being acknowledged by a supplier - purchase headers.
| New PO – not entered | A purchase order arrived by email with no sales order, archive record or posted document in BC. Someone needs to key it in. Only raised for a message from outside the company with something attached: a PO number typed into a reply, or mentioned in a colleague's note, is a reference and not an order, so those are not listed. |
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| Price variance | The price on the PO differs from the order — including an order sitting at $0.00, which is the most common form of this. |
| Quantity difference | Quantity on the PO does not match the order lines. |
| Ship / delivery date difference | The dates disagree by more than a day, or the requested delivery date in BC has passed and the shipment date has too while the order is still being discussed. A requested date in the past on its own is not flagged: Inside Sales moves the shipment date and lets delivery follow from the shipping time, so a shipment date still ahead means the order is being worked. |
| Ship-to difference | The delivery address on the PO does not obviously match the order. |
| PO revision not reflected | A revised PO arrived after BC was last changed. |
| Read from a scan – verify | Values were read off an image by Claude. They are deliberately not compared automatically; confirm them against the attachment first. |
| Attachment not machine-readable | No longer listed here. A scan nothing could read is not something anyone can act on from this grid, so it is recorded against the message in Emails screened and counted under Scans with no text layer instead of filling the action list. |
| PO already posted | Live correspondence about an order that is already shipped, or archived without a live order. Invoiced orders are not listed - that is finished business with nothing to do. They still appear under All POs, so an invoiced PO reads as checked rather than missed. |
| Agrees | Everything comparable matches. Nothing to do. |
| Confirmed ✓ | Somebody looked at this and decided it is fine as it stands. Open the row and press Confirm this is fine on any exception to do that; it drops off the action list and out of the workbook, with your name and the date against it, and undo puts it back. A confirmation covers the situation you were shown — if the figures behind it change in Business Central, that is a different situation and the row returns. Use it for the ones that are correct about the data and still not a problem. |
| Cleared ✓ | This order needed action until the last Re-check BC, and no longer does — somebody fixed it. It stays on the list until you switch filters or reload, then joins the ones that agree. |
Severity — High money or a missing order is at stake; Medium worth correcting today; Low informational. Columns starting BC come from Business Central; PO columns come from the email or its attachment. Document and item numbers link into Business Central; the subject opens the message in Outlook.
Making the grid yours. Click a heading to sort by it, again to reverse it; an arrow shows which column is in charge. Drag the right-hand edge of a heading to widen or narrow that column, and double-click an edge to put every column back to the width of its contents. Both the sort and the widths are remembered in this browser — per grid, across filter switches, re-checks and reloads — so a layout that suits you is set up once. They are yours alone: nothing about them reaches the server or anybody else, and clearing your browser data forgets them.
Emails screened
Every message the run looked at — the audit trail. Most rows are ordinary mail with nothing to reconcile; they are listed so you can see the run covered them rather than skipped them.
| Received | When it arrived, as the mailbox recorded it: in UTC on the web app (the heading then says so), in the PC's own time on a desktop copy. The window is the number of days you entered. |
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| Sender / Subject | As they appear in Outlook. |
| Attachments | What was attached. A note in brackets means it could not be read — scanned image PDF is a picture of a page with no text in it. |
| PO refs | Purchase order numbers found in the subject, body or attachments. A dash means none — carrier chatter, QA notes, out-of-office replies. |
Numbers reach this column from the strongest source available: a parsed attachment first, then the subject, then the body. Shipping-paperwork reference numbers are deliberately excluded — a delivery note carries its own numbers, and treating those as customer POs would invent orders nobody placed.
Reading never changes the mailbox. Nothing is marked read, moved or flagged, and every run checks the unread count before and after to prove it.
Run
Progress
Unattended runs
While the switch is on, a run starts every 4 hours. On the web app the server does this by itself and reads the mailbox through Microsoft 365 as the app, which can open the Inside Sales mailbox and no other, so nobody needs to be signed in. A desktop copy ticks only while its server window is open and Outlook is running. A scheduled run is skipped if one is already going, and the next is scheduled after the previous finishes, so slow runs cannot stack up. The switch state survives a restart.
Reading the mailbox never changes it — messages are not marked read, moved or flagged, and every run verifies the unread count is unchanged before and after.
Days, Unread and Read scans are separate from the Run panel above, so a scheduled sweep can use a smaller window than a catch-up you type by hand. Each run's workbook stays with it in the history below: open the run, then Download Excel. A desktop copy also copies each scheduled run's workbook to its OneDrive folder, replacing the previous one.