Case Study: How a Wholesale Distributor Automated QuickBooks Sync

Pacific Coast Supply is a mid-size wholesale distributor of janitorial and sanitation products based in Portland, Oregon. With over 1,200 active B2B accounts across the Pacific Northwest, they process an average of 540 orders per week. Every single one of those orders used to be entered into QuickBooks Online by hand.

Their operations manager, a 15-year veteran of the business, described the situation plainly: "We had three full-time people whose entire job was typing orders into QuickBooks. When one of them called in sick, we fell behind. When two were out during flu season, it was a crisis. We knew it was unsustainable, but we did not know how to fix it without replacing everything."

This is the story of how Pacific Coast Supply went from 35 hours per week of manual QuickBooks data entry to near-zero, without replacing their existing systems, without disrupting their customer relationships, and without a single day of downtime during the transition.

The Challenge

Pacific Coast Supply's order intake was a tangled web of formats and channels. Approximately 40% of their orders arrived as PDF purchase orders via email. Another 30% came through their basic B2B web portal. The remaining 30% were a mix of phone orders transcribed by sales reps, faxed POs from legacy accounts, and EDI transmissions from their largest retail customers.

Regardless of how an order arrived, the destination was the same: QuickBooks Online. And the path to get there was entirely manual. A data entry clerk would open the order source, identify the customer, look up the account in QuickBooks, create a new sales order, manually enter each line item including SKU, quantity, unit price, and any special instructions, apply the correct pricing tier, calculate any applicable discounts, and save the order. The process took an average of 12 to 18 minutes per order.

"We were processing 540 orders a week. At an average of 15 minutes per order, that is 135 hours of pure data entry. We had three people doing nothing else, and they were still falling behind by Friday every single week."

The errors were just as costly as the labor. Manual entry produced an average error rate of 4.2%, which translated to roughly 23 incorrect orders per week. Each error required investigation, correction, and often a difficult conversation with a customer. The operations team estimated that each error cost approximately $85 in labor, shipping corrections, and customer goodwill, adding up to nearly $100,000 per year in error-related costs alone.

The Solution

The automation solution needed to handle every order format Pacific Coast Supply received and deliver each order cleanly into QuickBooks Online without human intervention for routine orders. Here is how the system was architected.

Before and after workflow comparison showing the elimination of manual data entry between order intake and QuickBooks.

The integration platform was built on Make.com, connecting Pacific Coast Supply's email inbox, B2B portal, and EDI feed to QuickBooks Online through a series of automated workflows. PDF orders are processed using AI-powered document parsing that extracts customer name, PO number, line items, quantities, and pricing from unstructured PDF layouts. The system maintains a mapping table that matches customer-specific product codes to Pacific Coast Supply's internal SKUs, handling the translation automatically.

For each incoming order, the automation validates the customer account against QuickBooks, confirms that all SKUs are active and in stock, applies the correct pricing tier and any negotiated discounts, and creates the sales order in QuickBooks. Orders that pass all validation checks are created automatically. Orders with exceptions, such as unrecognized SKUs, pricing discrepancies, or new customer accounts, are routed to a human review queue with the specific issue flagged for quick resolution.

The rollout was phased over three weeks. In week one, the system processed web portal orders only, which had the most structured data. In week two, PDF and email orders were added. In week three, EDI and fax orders were integrated. At each phase, the automated output was compared against manual entry for 100% of orders to verify accuracy before the human step was removed.

The Results

The impact was immediate and measurable. Within the first full month of operation, Pacific Coast Supply documented the following outcomes.

• Data entry labor reduced by 97%. Weekly manual entry dropped from 135 hours to approximately 4 hours, consisting entirely of exception handling. Two of the three data entry clerks were redeployed to customer service and sales support roles.
• Order error rate dropped from 4.2% to 0.3%. The remaining errors were almost exclusively related to ambiguous customer POs rather than data entry mistakes, reducing error-related costs from $100,000 per year to under $14,000.
• Order processing speed improved by 94%. The average time from order receipt to QuickBooks entry dropped from 4.6 hours (including queue time) to 11 minutes.
• Annual cost savings exceeded $185,000. This includes $120,000 in redeployed labor costs, $86,000 in reduced error costs, minus the annual cost of the automation platform and maintenance.
• Customer satisfaction scores increased by 18%. Faster order confirmations, fewer errors, and the redeployed staff providing proactive customer service contributed to measurably higher satisfaction in quarterly surveys.

Quantified results from the first 90 days of automated QuickBooks sync.

Key Takeaways

Pacific Coast Supply's experience highlights several principles that apply broadly to wholesale distributors considering automation.

You do not need to replace your systems. QuickBooks Online remained the system of record throughout. The automation layer sits between order intake and QuickBooks, translating and transferring data without requiring any changes to the accounting platform itself.

Phase your rollout by data complexity. Starting with the most structured data source (the web portal) allowed the team to validate the automation logic in a low-risk environment before tackling the more complex PDF and fax parsing workflows.

Design for exceptions, not just the happy path. The system was designed from the start to route uncertain orders to humans rather than guessing. This built trust with the operations team and ensured that automation never created more problems than it solved.

Redeploy, do not eliminate. The two clerks who were freed from data entry became customer service specialists. They now proactively reach out to accounts, handle complex order modifications, and contribute directly to revenue growth rather than spending their days copying numbers between screens.

If your wholesale distribution operation is still manually entering orders into QuickBooks, the question is not whether automation makes sense. It is how much it is costing you to wait. Learn more about wholesale distribution automation and QuickBooks integration solutions.