Emailed order automation for Cin7 Core and Cin7 Omni

Zestcode Automation builds bespoke platforms that read customers’ emailed purchase orders, check every line against your Cin7 products, stock and prices, and create the sale in Cin7 after a person approves it. It works with both Cin7 Core and Cin7 Omni, but they connect in different ways, so the first thing we establish is which one you use.

Which Cin7 are you on?

Cin7 sells two inventory products under one name, and they’re easy to confuse.

• Cin7 Core is the product that used to be called DEAR Inventory. It’s often chosen by smaller wholesalers and product businesses who want inventory, purchasing and sales in one place, connected to Xero or QuickBooks.
• Cin7 Omni is the original Cin7 platform, generally aimed at larger and more complex operations with retail, wholesale and EDI in the mix.

The two have separate APIs, different data structures and different ways of representing customers, pricing and sales, so a connector written for one won’t work with the other. On the discovery call we confirm the product, your subscription and what API access it includes, and the specification is then written for that product alone. If you aren’t certain which you have, your Cin7 account contact can tell you, or we can check together on the call.

The same front end, whichever product you have

For your sales team, nothing differs between the two. A monitored order inbox picks up each email, and AI reads the body and every attachment as a single order. Each field gets a confidence score out of 10, scores under 7 are flagged, and anything missing is left empty for a person to fill.

Then ordinary code checks the result against Cin7:

1. The sender is matched to a Cin7 customer.
2. Each product code or SKU is looked up.
3. Available stock is checked at the relevant location.
4. The unit price is compared with the price that customer should receive.
5. The PO number is compared with that customer’s previous orders.

The order then waits in a review queue, with the original email alongside, until someone approves it.

What happens at the Cin7 end

With Cin7 Core

Approved orders are created as sales in Cin7 Core against the matched customer, with the customer’s PO number carried as the reference. Core’s own sale process takes over from there, including whatever it already does with your accounting connection. During specification we agree how far along Core’s sale process each order should be when it arrives, for example whether your team still wants to authorise it inside Core.

With Cin7 Omni

Omni handles sales orders through its own structures and its own approach to B2B accounts and pricing. Approved orders are created as sales orders in Omni with the PO reference, and price checks are made against the pricing Omni holds for that customer. Omni setups are often heavily configured, so we spend more of the specification mapping things like branches, pricing and order status before anything is built.

Where Cin7’s built-in options stop

Cin7 has a large integration marketplace and B2B ordering features of its own, and if your trade customers are happy to order through a portal, encourage them. Plenty won’t. Buyers at large customers raise POs in their own purchasing systems, and smaller ones send whatever is quickest. A bespoke platform is for the orders that will always arrive by email, and for checks you want a person to see before an order reaches Cin7. The order capture page goes into how those emails are read.

Cost, timescale and who holds the keys

The finished platform runs on hosting accounts registered to your business, and the code belongs to you as well. There’s no monthly licence per user, and choosing a maintenance plan is entirely up to you.

Capture, review and the Cin7 connection together usually cost £8k–£12k ex VAT and take roughly six weeks, including testing on your own orders. Running it costs very little: hosting at around $25 a month plus 2p–5p of AI per order. The price is fixed once the written specification is agreed, and that specification costs you nothing. See pricing for the add-ons.