An order automation project brings together people who don’t quite speak the same language: sales administration, sales management, IT and the software vendor. This glossary defines the 16 terms that come up most often, in alphabetical order. For each one, a single sentence explains what it actually changes for a sales administration team.
AI agent
An AI agent is a program that does more than produce text: it chains actions together to reach a goal, using tools and data along the way. In sales administration, an agent reads an email, recognises it as an order, finds the customer and the items in the ERP, runs the checks it has been set up to run and creates the order. It works within a framework defined in advance: rules, thresholds and situations where it must hand over to a person.
For sales admin: the work shifts from doing to steering, which means setting the agent’s rules, monitoring what it processes and taking over whatever it flags.
Automation rate
The automation rate is the share of orders, or order lines, processed end to end without human intervention. It depends as much on data quality (catalogue, price lists, reference mappings) as on the tool itself, and it usually rises over the first weeks as the rules are refined. When comparing figures, you need to know what is being counted: orders or lines, and across which customers.
For sales admin: what matters is not only the rate, but that every order not fully automated is clearly flagged, along with what still needs checking.
Backorder
A backorder is the part of an order that could not be delivered with the rest, usually because it was out of stock. It stays open in the ERP until it is delivered or cancelled. Depending on what has been agreed with the customer, you either ship what you have and keep the balance open, or wait until everything is available.
For sales admin: backorders generate a good share of customer questions (“where is the rest of my order?”), which can be answered automatically by reading the order status in the ERP.
Confidence score
A confidence score is an indication, assigned by the system to each piece of data it extracts or matches, of how certain it is. A reference found exactly as written in the catalogue gets a high score; a vague description that could match two different items gets a low one. Thresholds agreed with the business decide what goes straight through and what is sent to the team.
For sales admin: the score tells you where to look, so you review the doubtful line rather than the whole order.
Credit exposure
Credit exposure, or the customer’s outstanding balance, is the amount a customer owes the business at a given moment: unpaid invoices, often plus open orders that have not been invoiced yet. It is compared with a credit limit set by the business or by its credit insurer. An order that would push the customer over that limit is usually blocked or referred to the finance team.
For sales admin: checking credit exposure before entering an order avoids preparing something that will be blocked later, and an automated tool runs that check on every order instead of relying on someone remembering to.
Customer reference
A customer reference is the code or description a customer uses for an item, which is not necessarily the supplier’s own. An electrician might order “MCB 16A SP+N” or quote a code from their own purchasing system, while the item carries a completely different reference in the distributor’s ERP. These mappings are sometimes stored in the ERP, but often only in the team’s heads.
For sales admin: this is where many entry errors creep in, and where a tool must show how sure it is (see how AI matches customer references to your catalogue).
EDI (electronic data interchange)
EDI is the exchange of business documents (orders, despatch advices, invoices) directly between two companies’ computer systems, in a standard format such as EDIFACT. Nobody reads the order: it arrives already structured and flows into the ERP. The trade-off is that every connection is a technical project to run with each trading partner, which in practice limits it to large customers and regular flows.
For sales admin: EDI handles a few key accounts well, but leaves out the customers who order by email, who are often the ones keeping the team busy (see alternatives to EDI for email orders).
ERP
The ERP (enterprise resource planning system) is the software that holds a company’s core business data: customers, items, prices, stock, orders, invoices. It is where the order has to end up, and where the information needed to check it lives. Sage 100, Sage X3, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Odoo, Cegid, Divalto and SAP are common examples among distributors and manufacturers.
For sales admin: an automation tool is only as good as its link to the ERP, because without access to prices, stock and customer terms it can copy but cannot check.
Exception
An exception is an order, or an order line, that falls outside the expected case: an unknown reference, a price that differs from the price list, an unusual quantity, a new delivery address, an out-of-stock item. Exceptions are a minority, but they take up most of a team’s time. How they are handled follows rules specific to each business, sometimes to each customer.
For sales admin: in an automated flow, the team no longer sees every order go by, only the ones flagged to it, with the reason they were flagged.
LLM (large language model)
An LLM is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text, able to understand and produce language. Unlike a rules-based system, it can interpret wording nobody planned for: “send me 3 boxes of nitrile gloves in L”, an abbreviated description, a badly labelled column in a spreadsheet. On its own it can be confidently wrong, which is why it is combined with checks against the company’s real data.
For sales admin: this is what makes it possible to read freely written orders without setting up a document template for every customer.
OCR (optical character recognition)
OCR turns an image of text (a scan, a photo, a non-searchable PDF) into text a computer can process. It is a reading step, not an understanding step: OCR alone cannot tell whether a number is a quantity or a batch number. Traditional OCR-based extraction tools often rely on templates, one per purchase order layout.
For sales admin: a template-based tool has to be reconfigured every time a customer changes format, which quickly limits how many customers it really covers.
Order acknowledgement
An order acknowledgement is the document, or email, in which the supplier confirms to the customer that the order has been recorded. It usually restates the items, quantities, prices applied and an expected delivery date. Some companies call it an order confirmation. It is often the document people refer back to when there is a disagreement over a price or a lead time.
For sales admin: when the order is entered automatically, the acknowledgement can go out straight away, and the customer no longer needs to call to check the order arrived.
Order processing time
Order processing time is the time between receiving an order and its validated entry in the ERP, or the sending of the acknowledgement. It does not measure the time spent keying the order, but the total wait seen by the customer, queue included. It varies a lot with the time of arrival, the day of the week and the team’s workload.
For sales admin: it is the metric that tells you whether the inbox is under control, and measuring it shows when orders are left waiting.
Purchase order
A purchase order (PO) is the document a customer uses to place an order with a supplier. At a minimum it states who is ordering, which items and how many, and usually a price, an address and a requested delivery date. In B2B, it arrives in many forms: a PDF produced by the customer’s ERP, a spreadsheet, a few lines in the body of an email, a scanned handwritten form.
For sales admin: an automation tool is only useful if it reads all of these formats, without asking customers to change the way they order.
Sales administration (ADV)
Sales administration, known in France as ADV (administration des ventes), is the function that handles an order between the sale and the invoice: receiving it, entering it in the ERP, checking prices and terms, tracking deliveries, dealing with complaints. It links the customer, the sales reps, the warehouse and finance. In many smaller companies, the role is filled by sales assistants or inside sales staff rather than a dedicated department.
For sales admin: automation does not remove the job, it removes the retyping so there is more room for customer follow-up and difficult cases.
Unit of measure
The unit of measure, or pack size, is the unit in which an item is sold or delivered: by the piece, by the box of 12, by the pack of 50, by the pallet, by the metre or by the roll. The same product can come in several units, and the customer does not necessarily order in the unit the ERP uses. A hygiene distributor might receive an order for “10 boxes” of hand towels while its ERP counts in rolls.
For sales admin: a botched conversion multiplies or divides a quantity by 12, hence the value of a systematic check that flags inconsistent quantities (see our article on unit of measure conversion in orders).
Going further
All of these terms appear along the path of an order received by email: reading the PO, matching references, checking prices, stock and credit exposure, creating the order in the ERP, sending the acknowledgement. The order entry page shows how Eledone chains these steps together, and what it flags to the team.
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