What retyping orders really costs a mid-size distributor, and what fixing it costs

Ask an owner what order entry costs and the usual answer is a shrug and a headcount. “We’ve got people who do that.” The payroll line is easy to see. The rest of the cost is spread across the warehouse, the credit department and the phone, where nobody adds it up.

This page does the adding. The first half puts numbers on what retyping customer orders costs you, using your own figures. The second half explains, in plain words, what decides how much it costs to take that work off your team. We don’t publish prices, so you won’t find a range here. You will find the questions that set the price, so you can judge any quote you get, ours included.

The cost you already know: hours at the keyboard

Start with what the job actually is: a person reading a customer’s PO and typing it into your system, line by line.

The time goes in small pieces that are easy to miss:

• Reading the order. Every customer lays out a PO differently. Finding the ship-to, the requested date and the buyer’s notes takes a minute before the first line is keyed.
• Translating it. The customer’s part number isn’t yours, and keeping those pairs straight is a job of its own. Their “case” may be your “each.” Somebody looks it up, or asks the one coworker who knows.
• Checking it. Is the price what this customer pays? Is the quantity normal for them? Is the item still stocked? Careful people check. Rushed people skip it.
• Answering about it. “Did you get my order?” calls land on the same desk, and every one of them stops the keying.

A short reorder takes a few minutes. A long restock order from a big account can eat most of an hour, and Monday mornings stack them up.

A worked estimate for the labor

Here is the first worked estimate. It is an example to swap your own numbers into, not a figure from any real distributor. Say two people on your desk each spend about 10 hours a week keying customer orders, at a loaded cost of $28 an hour.

People doing it

2

Hours each, per week

10

Loaded cost per hour

$28

Hours per month

87

Cost per year

$29,120

Hours back per month

43–61

An estimate from the numbers above, not a client result. It assumes 50%–70% of the work can be taken off your team; your audit checks that against your own numbers.

That is 1,040 hours a year spent typing what a customer already wrote down. Change the team size, the hours or the rate and the total moves with them.

If you need a starting point for the rate, there is a published one. The Bureau of Labor Statistics put the mean hourly wage for order clerks in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro at $22.78 in its May 2025 wage estimates. That is a wage, not a loaded cost. Add what you pay on top for payroll taxes and benefits, which is why the example above uses a higher figure.

The cost nobody adds up: one mis-keyed line

The hours are only the visible part. The second worked estimate follows a single wrong line through your business. Again, every number here is a placeholder for your own.

A customer orders 12 cases of an item. The person keying it picks the neighboring item in the list, the one with a similar number. Nobody notices. Here is where that one line goes:

1. The picker pulls the wrong product and it ships on the next truck. The freight is already spent.
2. The customer calls. Someone in customer service spends maybe 20 minutes finding the order, comparing it with the PO and apologizing.
3. The right product reships. Say that’s another $90 in freight, plus the picking and packing time again.
4. The wrong product comes back. Someone receives it, checks it and puts it away. Call it another 20 minutes, if it comes back sellable.
5. Accounting issues a credit memo. Someone matches the return to the invoice and writes the credit. The customer may hold the whole invoice until it arrives, so cash comes in weeks later than it should.

Add those up with your own freight and labor rates and one keystroke can easily cost more than an hour of the clerk’s time. Then ask how many of these you had last month. If nobody knows, that’s the point: the cost lands in freight, returns and credits rather than on the order desk.

There is a quieter cost too. The buyer remembers the wrong delivery. A competitor’s rep only needs one bad week to get a meeting.

What changes once the retyping stops

Your customers keep ordering the way they do now. On your side, orders can go in the day they arrive, the checks your best person makes happen on every order and only the odd ones reach a person. That is what you would be paying for: hours back, fewer wrong lines reaching a picker and a desk that spends its time on customers instead of typing.

What decides the cost of fixing it

Nobody can price this fairly without looking at your orders first. These are the things that move the cost.

How many customers, and how many formats. Ten customers who all send the same clean PDF are simpler than 200 customers with 60 layouts between them. The work is mostly in learning each sender’s habits.

How many orders. Volume matters less than people think. A busy desk with steady formats can cost less to fix than a small desk with messy ones. Volume mostly decides how fast the savings pile up.

How many odd cases. Handwritten changes, partial releases, special pricing, drop-ship addresses in a note at the bottom. Each kind of exception has to be handled on purpose. The more of them you have, the more there is to set up.

How many checks your team makes. Some desks check price and quantity. Others also check credit holds, minimum order rules and whether an item is about to be discontinued. The more you want checked on every order, the more there is to set up. It should also mean fewer wrong lines get through.

Straight in or wait for approval. Letting clean orders go straight in takes more care up front for each customer. Holding every order for a person to approve is simpler to start. You can begin with approval on and switch each customer over once their orders run clean.

Which system you run matters less than people expect. Orders land where your team enters them today, so nobody learns a new screen.

How the price gets set

Because those five things vary so much, a published price would be wrong for almost everyone. Here is how it works instead.

It starts with a free 20-minute audit call about how orders reach you now and where they get stuck. Within 48 hours you get a written plan. After the audit you get a fixed-scope quote, so you know the cost before anything is built. Your first workflow goes live within 14 days of access to your tools, and it runs on the tools you already use.

Bring your own numbers to that call. The labor estimate above and a rough count of last month’s wrong shipments are enough to judge whether the quote makes sense for you. If it doesn’t, you have still learned what your order desk really costs.

For more on order problems in this trade, see our guides for distributors. For the general version of this work, read how distributors stop retyping emailed POs. To follow a single order from the email to a saved sales order, read how to stop keying customer POs into your ERP by hand. To see what a project covers, read how we scope the work for distributors.

Where to start this week

You can build most of the case yourself before any call.

1. Count a week of orders. Note how many arrive, from whom and in what form.
2. Time the keying. Pick a few orders of different sizes and time them from opening the email to saving the order.
3. Pull last month’s credits. Find the credit memos and reships that started with a wrong line, and price each one.
4. List your checks. Write down every question a careful person on the desk asks before saving an order.
5. Mark the odd cases. Flag the customers whose orders always need a phone call.

With that in hand, the cost of retyping stops being a shrug and becomes a number. Book a free audit when you want to see what it costs to bring that number down.