Take your first order from upload to delivered
Upload a real purchase order, review it, and send it to the supplier.
Add the supplier
Everything else hangs off this. ProcuLink checks item codes against a supplier, delivers to a supplier, and routes incoming orders to a supplier — so one has to exist before anything can happen.
Partners → Suppliers → New supplier, name it, save. That is the required part, and it takes a minute.
While you are there, fill in the Identifiers card on the supplier's Overview tab — their VAT number, registration number, EDI/GLN code, and email domain. It is optional, and it is what lets a future order that does not name them plainly still find its way. Full detail: add a supplier and fill in their identifiers.
The supplier appears in Partners → Suppliers.
Load their item codes
Ask the supplier for their current price list as a CSV or XLSX, and import it on the supplier's Catalog tab.
This step is optional and skipping it is the single most common reason a first order feels like hard work. With a catalog, unknown codes are flagged and suggestions come from products the supplier really sells. Without one, every unfamiliar code on the order is something you resolve by hand with nothing to check against.
Ten minutes here saves most of step 4. See import a supplier catalog from a file.
If this fails
No price list to hand? Carry on. Every code you resolve manually is remembered, so the mapping table fills itself from real work — it is just slower to start.
Upload a real purchase order
Open Upload, set Send to to your supplier, drop the file, and press ↑ Upload & review.
CSV, XLSX, and text-based PDF are the everyday formats; structured XML, cXML, UBL, EDIFACT, X12, and SAP IDoc are read too. Each file becomes its own order — files are never merged.
ProcuLink parses in the background and opens the review screen when it is ready. More on the upload screen itself: upload order files by hand.
The order opens on its own review screen, with the right purchase-order number and its line items.
If this fails
An order that stops at Failed is a document problem rather than a ProcuLink one — most often a missing required column, a scanned PDF with no text layer, or an encoding that mangled the header row. See troubleshooting common parse errors.
Clear the review list
The review screen shows What we received on the left, What we'll send in the middle, and a panel on the right with two tabs: Issues — the Before you send list — and Preview, the document your supplier would actually receive.
Work the Issues list. Only entries marked BLOCKER stop a send; WARNING entries are worth a look but do not hold anything up. For each unresolved item code, either Accept suggestion — with its confidence shown — or Enter manually and type the supplier's own code.
Everything you resolve here is remembered per supplier, so this list gets shorter with every order. Two guides go deeper: review an order and send it and resolve item codes in review.
The panel reads Ready to send · No open issues — every required field is filled and checked.
Ask the supplier how they want it, then configure delivery
This is the step with a person in it, so start it early — often before step 3, since the answer can take a day.
Ask them three questions and write the answers down:
- How should we send orders? An endpoint we post to, an SFTP folder, or an email address?
- In what format? CSV, JSON, XML, cXML, UBL/Peppol, or X12 850?
- What credentials do we need, and who do we tell when a test arrives?
Then fill that into the supplier's Delivery tab, press Save delivery, and press Test-fire. A green result proves the credentials and the path against their real endpoint before any order depends on it. Full walkthrough, per channel: set up delivery to a supplier and test-fire it.
If this fails
Until delivery is configured, sending stops at delivery not set up. That is deliberate — an order is never reported as sent when nothing has been sent. Everything up to that point still works, so you can review orders today and configure delivery when the supplier answers.
Send it, and check what the supplier saw
Send the order. It moves ready_to_deliver → delivering → delivered.
Then do the thing that is easy to skip on a first order: ask the supplier whether it arrived and looks
right. delivered means their system accepted the transmission — not that a person or an ERP on their
side accepted the order. For a first send, that gap is exactly where surprises live.
One real purchase order has gone the whole way through ProcuLink and been confirmed by the supplier — and the item codes, the mapping, and the delivery configuration you set up along the way are reused by every order after it.
Stop uploading by hand
You have now done the whole path manually once, which is the right way to learn it and the wrong way to run it.
Pick the channel that matches how orders already reach you and set it up once:
- Orders arrive by email → receive orders by email
- A system can push structured data → push orders in over the API
- A system exports files to a folder → pull order files from an SFTP folder or from S3 or Cloudflare R2
They all land in the same Inbox and are reviewed exactly as you just did. Only the way in changes.
Orders arrive on their own, and your job narrows to the ones that genuinely need a decision.