For industrial MRO distributors on QuickBooks Online

SideQuest for Industrial MRO distributors on QuickBooks Online

If your sales team supports plant maintenance buyers, you see the same problem every day. The plant uses one part number, the manufacturer uses another, and your house number is a third. Buyers ask for what's on the plant's bill of materials and expect you to know it cross-references to your shelf SKU. SideQuest reads the inbound PO out of Gmail, looks up the cross-reference, matches the line to your QuickBooks Online catalog, and builds the draft Estimate. Your inside sales team reviews instead of typing.

What changes for you

Cross-reference matching out of the box

Plant buyers write MFG part numbers, OEM part numbers, plant-internal numbers, sometimes all three on the same line. Load your cross-reference CSV once and SideQuest matches against every alias. Confidence 1.0 hits get auto-marked clean. Misses get flagged so an operator picks a SKU once, and that decision is remembered for every future PO from that same buyer.

Long-tail SKUs stop slowing down the desk

MRO catalogs run 50,000 to 250,000 active items. Typing those in by hand is where errors live. SideQuest's matcher walks exact SKU, cross-reference, then description fuzzy match. Long-tail items the rep has never sold before still land on the right line because the description carries enough signal.

Same-day pricing on emergency orders

Plant downtime is measured in thousands of dollars per hour. The clean-draft pipeline submits matched POs to QuickBooks the same hour the email lands. Customer reply drafts confirm the order with line totals and ship dates so the buyer can close the work order before lunch.

Why this fits

Catalog quirk: every customer carries a different part number

An MRO distributor's cross-reference table is the actual moat. SideQuest auto-learns it. Every time a rep manually resolves an unmatched part to a SKU, the connector writes a (customer, customer_part, internal_sku) row. The next PO from that customer with that part auto-matches at 100% confidence.

Customer mix: maintenance buyers, plant engineers, MRO storerooms

Maintenance buyers order in spurts (preventive maintenance schedules), plant engineers order one-off (project work), storerooms order min-max replenishment. SideQuest handles all three patterns through the same draft pipeline. Storeroom replenishments often arrive as CSV attachments; the parser reads those as line lists.

Seasonal swings on shutdown season

Process plants run shutdown season in spring and fall. Order volume spikes 3-5x for two-week windows. SideQuest scales without hiring temp staff. The draft-review path is 4-6x faster than the type-from-scratch path, so the same inside sales team handles the spike.

Start free for 30 days

The Solo tier covers up to 100 POs per month. Setup is install the connector, point it at your Gmail and your QuickBooks Online file, and let it parse your next inbound PO. No credit card to start.

Quick-start guide See pricing

FAQ

Does SideQuest support customer-specific cross-references for the same part?

Yes. Each row in your cross-reference CSV is keyed on (customer_id, customer_part, internal_sku). The same plant-internal part number can map to different SKUs depending on which customer is asking. Customer-specific rows always win over global aliases.

Can SideQuest read POs that arrive as CSV attachments instead of PDFs?

Yes. CSV attachments get parsed as line lists with the same matching pipeline applied. Storeroom replenishments and ERP-exported POs typically arrive this way.

How does SideQuest handle parts where the buyer asks for a discontinued SKU?

If the discontinued SKU is still in QuickBooks as Active, the match still lands but the dashboard's catalog hygiene card surfaces it as a long-tail finding. Mark the item Inactive in QuickBooks and SideQuest skips it on future matches. Mark a replacement SKU and update the cross-reference once for that customer.

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