Toolbx Launches AI Order Entry Program

Toolbx, the order-to-cash platform for independent building-supply dealers, announced it has launched AI Order Entry. The tool takes material lists and purchase orders customers and sales reps send in, matches every line to the dealer’s own catalog and pushes the approved order into the ERP, with no manual matching or keying. This is the first tool in Forge AI, Toolbx’s line of AI tools aimed at the repetitive work across a dealer’s operation, from the order desk to the back office.

“Take twenty orders a day at twelve minutes each. That is four hours of somebody’s day, every day, spent typing,” says Erik Bornstein, founder and CEO of Toolbx. “This is not about having fewer people. It is about automating what your people spend their time on, so those four hours go into quoting the next job instead. The customer is waiting the whole time, and the first quote back usually wins the work.”

Toolbx connects to the email inbox a dealer already uses, so material lists are picked up and drafted automatically, whatever form they arrive in. Teams can also bulk upload, queuing up to ten files at once, with each becoming its own draft order.

“We all scribble like doctors. Sometimes I can’t read my own handwriting, but AI Order Entry can,” says Scott McNutt, IT manager at Swift Supply, a sixth-generation dealer with five locations in Alabama and Florida that has been using AI Order Entry through early access.

The tool captures whatever context the document carries: the customer, the account, the job site, the requested date, the delivery or will-call details and any notes. Every line is matched to a SKU and unit of measure in the dealer’s own catalog, and related products are grouped the way a sales rep would lay out a quote. A drafted order typically comes back in under a minute.

Toolbx tunes each dealer’s catalog before it goes live and expects match rates of 95% or better where product data is complete. A dealer can train the agent on their own products, shorthand and customers, and rules and synonyms are written in plain English and applied across every quote, so a correction made once holds.

Setup is also handled by Toolbx. The dealer provides access to their ERP, Toolbx pulls the product data and tunes the matching against it, then tests the matching against the dealer’s own past material lists, line by line, before go-live. There is no implementation work on the dealer’s side.

“The customer already sent the file or the picture with everything we need, and without AI Order Entry the sales team would have to type all of that into our ERP,” McNutt says. “Now we can have several orders being created at once while the team is helping other customers.”