How to Use PO Automation

Every email to orders@esqembroidery.com is automatically read by AI, sorted into the right category, and — if it's a purchase order — turned into a row in the PO Queue Google Sheet with the order details already filled in. A human reviews the row, confirms the embroidery design and the customer contact are matched correctly, then clicks a button to send it to FileMaker.

Nothing gets written to FileMaker automatically. Every push is a deliberate human click, after review.

Open the PO Queue tab. Each row is one order. A few columns matter most for review:

Check the DST Items tab (linked rows below the same PO) for the embroidery design match — see Section 4 if it's not matched yet.

Every embroidery placement on a PO needs to be linked to an actual digitized design file in FileMaker. The system tries several ways to match automatically, in order:

• Remembered — you've resolved this exact wording for this company before (see "DST Aliases" below), so it's applied instantly. Row shows Auto (Remembered).
• Exactly one exact-text match — filled in automatically. Row shows Auto.
• Multiple possible matches, or only "similar" (not exact) matches — a Pick link appears on the DST Items row. Click it, search visually (with thread color swatches and prior-order history), and pick the right one(s).
• No match found at all — same Pick link, search from scratch or flag it for manual FileMaker lookup.

On the picker page, check the box on more than one design card and hit Save Selected to attach several designs at once — useful when a customer's phrase (e.g. "Wagner Cat Rentals") actually maps to two files (a normal-background and a white-outline variant, say).

Open DST Picker

Click any PO Queue row's "Review →" link to open this. It shows candidate customer contacts (matched by the sender's email address) — confirm the right one, or search by name/email/company if the AI's guess was wrong or ambiguous.

Open Personnel Picker

Click "Push →" on a PO Queue row. You'll see a summary page — customer, company, contact, ship-to address, and every DST item on the order — before anything is sent.

• If company or contact is still unmatched, the page blocks the push and tells you what's missing (go fix it via the picker links first).
• If a DST item has no design match yet, you'll see a yellow warning and the button reads "Push Anyway" — clicking it pops a confirmation, then creates the Order and Ship To normally, just skipping that one design link (FileMaker requires an actual design match to create that record — there's no way to save a placeholder). Go back and match the design later; it won't create a duplicate order.
• Once sent, the row turns grey and fm_status shows "Sent" — pushing again is blocked unless that's cleared manually first.
• If a push fails, the row turns red and fm_error shows FileMaker's exact error message. Fix the underlying issue and try again — failed rows can always be retried.

Use this when an order never showed up in PO Queue automatically — almost always because the subject line was missing "PO"/"PO#"/"Purchase Order" (e.g. a customer just wrote the bare number, like "56348"). It's also useful if an email got sorted into the wrong tab (e.g. mistaken for a Supply Order) and you want to force it through as a real PO instead.

1. Open Force Process as PO and type the PO number.
2. You'll see every matching email to orders@ — subject, sender, date. Read carefully if there's more than one: sometimes a PO number shows up on an unrelated document too (e.g. a blank-garment supply order from the same vendor, or a reply in the same thread). Some resellers (DT Logos, confirmed) even reuse the exact same PO number for two completely different purchase orders — their own internal PO to a garment vendor, and the actual embroidery order to Esquire. Subject and sender alone can't always tell them apart — if a result looks ambiguous, process it and check whether the DST Items rows it creates actually have a design/search_term on them; a PO with no designs at all is a strong sign you picked the wrong one.
3. Click "Process this one," confirm the popup, and it runs straight through extraction and lands in PO Queue — same as if the filter had caught it automatically, just skipping the AI classification step since you've already told it "this is a PO."

Everything in Section 2 is actually run by a set of n8n workflows. You don't need to touch these day-to-day — but if you're ever poking around inside n8n, here's what each one is. The work is split into a main workflow that calls smaller SW ("sub-workflow") pieces, so any one part can be fixed or re-run on its own.

The live intake pipeline

Manual & recovery tools

Reference sync