How a Food Distributor Automated WhatsApp, Voice-Note and Photo Order Entry (4 Hours a Day to 30 Minutes)

Short answer: In 2026 Code2b built an order-entry system for a food distributor in Serbia that cut order entry from 4 hours a day to about 30 minutes. The distributor, with 450 B2B clients, has the system read every order wherever it arrives (WhatsApp messages, voice notes, emails and photos of handwritten lists), match product names and slang to the right SKU, and create the sales order in the ERP. Unclear lines are resolved from the client’s order history or sent to a person for a one-click confirmation.

This is one of the ten projects on our projects page. The client stays anonymous, but the numbers are theirs.

The problem: orders in every format, typed by hand

The distributor’s clients ordered the way that suited them: a WhatsApp message, a voice note, an email, or a photo of a handwritten list. None of it arrived in a form the ERP could take.

So two people spent every morning typing orders into the ERP, about 4 hours a day between them. Mistakes were frequent.

The hard part was never the typing alone. It was interpretation: clients wrote product names their own way, used slang, and sometimes just asked for “the usual”.

What we built

1. Every format is read. Text messages, emails, photos of handwritten lists and voice notes in Serbian are all turned into order lines. Clients keep ordering exactly as they did before.

2. Products are matched to the right SKU. Product names, abbreviations and slang are matched to the correct item in the catalogue, and the sales order is created in the ERP.

3. Unclear lines get resolved, not guessed. An order line like “the usual cheese” is resolved from that client’s order history. If the system is still not sure, it goes to a person for a one-click confirmation.

4. Stock is checked on arrival. Each order is checked against stock as it comes in. If something is out, the client is offered a substitute straight away, instead of finding out at delivery.

The result

• Order entry went from 4 hours a day to about 30 minutes of review.
• Unclear lines are confirmed by a person, not guessed.
• Clients changed nothing. They still order by WhatsApp, voice note, email or photo.

What other distributors can take from this

If you sell to trade customers and take orders over messaging apps, three questions tell you whether this is worth doing:

1. How many hours a day go into typing orders into your ERP? If it is more than an hour, most of it can be automated.
2. How many orders arrive as voice notes or photos? These are the ones people dread, and the ones a modern system reads well.
3. How often does a wrong delivery trace back to order entry? Every one of those is a cost you can remove.

The principle is the same as in our other builds: read the order where it arrives, write it into the system you already run, and send only the uncertain cases to a person. If you are weighing the tooling, our n8n vs Make vs Zapier comparison covers the options.

If your team types orders every morning, a free 20-minute call is enough for us to tell you what automating it would save.

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