Outsourced order entry and back office for wholesale distributors

Distribution is a volume business. Orders arrive as emails, PDFs, scanned forms and spreadsheets, and each one has to be read, checked and keyed in before anything ships. On the other side, supplier invoices pile up waiting to be entered and matched. When the order entry or AP seat is empty, both queues grow every day.

The back-office work in a distribution business

Task	What it involves	Where it usually lives
Sales order entry	Reading customer POs from email, PDF or fax scans and creating the sales order with the right items, quantities, prices and ship-to.	QuickBooks Enterprise, NetSuite, Acumatica, Sage or your order system
Order checks	Matching item numbers, units and prices against your catalog and customer price lists, and catching duplicates.	Your ERP and price lists
New customer setup	Creating accounts with billing and shipping details, tax status and terms you have approved.	Your ERP or CRM
Supplier invoice entry	Entering vendor invoices as bills and matching them to the purchase order and receiving record.	QuickBooks or your ERP
AR follow-up	Statements and written reminders for overdue accounts, and a list of who needs a call.	Email and your accounting software
Records upkeep	Updating tracking numbers, contact details and order status so your team and customers see the right information.	Your ERP, CRM or shared spreadsheet

What happens when the seat is empty

• Orders wait. An order that sits in an inbox overnight ships a day late. Customers notice before you do.
• Mistakes get through. When salespeople or warehouse staff key orders between other jobs, wrong units and old prices slip in, and the fix costs a credit memo or a return.
• Supplier bills pile up. Invoices that aren’t entered can’t be checked against the PO, so overcharges and duplicate bills get paid.
• Collections stop. Nobody has time to chase overdue accounts, so they age.

Distributors show up often in our own hiring data. In the job ads we reviewed for our November 2026 look at firms hiring back-office roles, logistics, purchasing and order entry roles were about one in five of the openings.

What Dull takes on

• Extract: we pull the order or invoice details out of what you already receive: emails, PDFs, scans and spreadsheets.
• Validate: every record is checked against your rules: required fields, item numbers, units, prices, totals, duplicates and your customer and product lists.
• Enter: clean records go into your system as sales orders or bills.
• Exceptions reviewed: anything unclear is set aside, reviewed by a person and sent to you with the reason and the question. Nothing is guessed.

We also send written AR reminders on your schedule and keep order status and contact records current. Every Friday you get a summary: records done, exceptions, anything blocked.

What stays with you

• Payments. We enter and match bills; you approve and pay them.
• Approval decisions: credit limits, credits, returns, price exceptions and write-offs.
• Payroll, tax filings and anything that needs a license.
• Card numbers. We don’t handle them.
• Phone calls with your customers. We handle the written follow-up and tell you who needs a call.

Hire, temp or hand it off

If you are hiring an order entry or AP clerk, it is worth knowing the full cost. A bookkeeping, accounting or auditing clerk earned a median of $49,210 a year in May 2024, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages are about 70% of what private employers spend per hour worked, with benefits making up the rest (BLS, June 2026). SHRM puts the average cost per hire at nearly $4,700.

A temp can cover a gap but needs training every time. Dull learns your rules once, from your own examples, and runs the same way every week. It is month to month, so you can use it while you hire or instead of hiring. The empty seat calculator puts your own numbers side by side.

How it starts

• A 15-minute call to agree which documents we handle first, such as customer POs or supplier invoices.
• Day one: a user login with only the access the job needs, about 20 example documents with the correct entries, your rules, and one named person who answers exception questions.
• Shadow first: we run alongside your current process and you approve everything. Then we take the work over.
• 30-day pilot: up to 300 standard records a month. A standard record is one document of one agreed type, such as one order or one invoice. After 30 days, continue monthly, add a second process, or stop.

Want to see it for your business first? Run a free back-office check.