Toolbx launches AI Order Entry so dealers quote faster and win more work

Material lists and purchase orders arrive as emails, spreadsheets or job-site photos. They come back matched to the dealer's own catalog and pushed into the ERP without anyone retyping a line.

SANTA MONICA, Calif., September 1, 2026 Toolbx, the order-to-cash platform for independent building-supply dealers, today made AI Order Entry generally available. The tool takes the material lists and purchase orders customers and sales reps send in, matches every line to the dealer's own catalog, and pushes the approved order into the ERP, with no manual matching or keying. It is the first tool in Forge AI, Toolbx's line of AI tools aimed at the repetitive work across a dealer's operation, from the order desk to the back office.

Order entry is one of the last parts of a dealer's day still done entirely by hand, and automation has been slow to reach it. A material list arrives as an unformatted email, a PDF, a spreadsheet, a photo from the job site, a text message or voicemail and someone at the order desk keys it in line by line, looking up SKUs and units of measure as they go. It is the same job whether the dealer sells lumber, hardware, or plumbing and HVAC supplies.

"Take twenty orders a day at twelve minutes each. That is four hours of somebody's day, every day, spent typing," said Erik Bornstein, founder and CEO of Toolbx. "This is not about having fewer people. It is about automating what your people spend their time on, so those four hours go into quoting the next job instead. The customer is waiting the whole time, and the first quote back usually wins the work."

Toolbx connects to the email inbox a dealer already uses, so material lists are picked up and drafted automatically, whatever form they arrive in. Teams can also bulk upload, queuing up to ten files at once, with each becoming its own draft order.

"We all scribble like doctors. Sometimes I can't read my own handwriting, but AI Order Entry can," said Scott McNutt, IT manager at Swift Supply, a sixth-generation dealer with five locations in Alabama and Florida that has been using AI Order Entry through early access.

The tool captures whatever context the document carries: the customer, the account, the job site, the requested date, the delivery or will-call details and any notes. Every line is matched to a SKU and unit of measure in the dealer's own catalog, and related products are grouped the way a sales rep would lay out a quote. A drafted order typically comes back in under a minute.

For the dealer, that shows up as more quotes going out, and going out sooner.

Any line the tool cannot match with high confidence is flagged for review, so the desk goes straight to those and approves the rest in a single action. Nothing writes to the dealer's ERP until someone signs off on the draft.

Toolbx tunes each dealer's catalog before go-live and expects match rates of 95% or better where product data is complete. A dealer can train the agent on their own products, shorthand and customers. Matching rules are dynamic, continuously improving with every material list received and fully referenceable in plain English.

Setup is handled by Toolbx. The dealer provides access to their ERP, Toolbx pulls the product data and tunes the matching against it, then tests the matching against the dealer's own past material lists, before go-live. There is no implementation work on the dealer's side.

"The customer already sent the file or the picture with everything we need, and without AI Order Entry the sales team would have to type all of that into our ERP," McNutt said. "Now we can have several orders being created at once while the team is helping other customers."

AI Order Entry is available now. More at toolbx.com/forge-ai/ai-order-entry.

About Toolbx

Toolbx is the order-to-cash platform for independent building-supply dealers: lumber yards, roofing suppliers, and plumbing and HVAC distributors. Orders, quotes, payments and collections run in one place, with online storefronts, self-serve Pro accounts, digital ordering and payments, and automated AR. Dealers use Toolbx to grow online sales, get paid faster, and give their Pro customers a modern way to buy. Toolbx integrates two-way with the major building-supply ERPs, including Epicor BisTrack, Epicor Eagle, ECI Spruce, and DMSi Agility.

More than $2 billion in building-supply orders and payments have been processed on Toolbx, where AI-powered fraud protection holds the fraud rate to 0.001%. Toolbx is used by more than 200 dealers and wholesalers, running over 1,000 locations across North America. Every day, more than 25,000 contractors and tradespeople order and pay on the platform. Dealers on the platform average 20% to 30% lower days sales outstanding.

Media contact

Connor McCarra Director, Customer Marketing at Toolbx connor@toolbx.com