Integration
B1 handles finance, inventory, production and the whole sales order to delivery to invoice document flow. What it does not do is read the PDF a customer emailed you. LevelOps PDF to Order turns that document into a validated Shopify draft order, approved by a person, and lets your existing Shopify to B1 integration take it from there.
SAP Business One is the SAP product built for small and mid sized manufacturers and distributors. Finance, inventory across warehouses, production with bills of material, purchasing, and the marketing document flow your team knows by heart: sales order, delivery, A/R invoice, each a real document with its own numbering series and approval path. It runs on HANA or SQL Server, on premise or hosted, and it is usually the most trusted system in the building.
Shopify sits in front of it for commerce, and orders reach B1 through an integration: a partner connector, a B1if scenario, or a custom build on the DI API or the B1 Service Layer. However it is wired, the pattern is the same. The order is created in Shopify, the integration creates the B1 sales order, and B1 owns everything after that.
Order intake is the exception nobody scoped. Purchase orders arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets and scans, and the last mile into B1 is a person and a keyboard. It is the least automated step in an otherwise heavily automated business, and it is the one that touches every order. LevelOps PDF to Order replaces that step with AI extraction, catalogue matching and a human approval, and then leaves your integration to do exactly what it already does.
B1 shops are usually disciplined about data. That discipline is exactly what makes manual intake so expensive.
Everything downstream of the sales order is controlled, numbered and auditable. The document that created it was an email attachment nobody logged, and the only record of what the customer actually asked for lives in someone's inbox.
B1 has a proper feature for customer part numbers, and it works when it is maintained. Across hundreds of business partners it drifts, so reps translate the buyer's codes by hand and the feature quietly stops being trusted.
B1 supports price lists, volume discounts and business partner special prices. A buyer prints last quarter's price. Whoever types the order has to know which of the three is correct, under time pressure.
Approval procedures are good at credit limits and discount thresholds. They cannot tell that item A1234 was keyed when the customer wanted A1243, because both are valid items with valid stock.
Adding intake automation inside B1 means add on development, a test company, an upgrade compatibility check and a maintenance window. The interim solution stays the same two people and the same shared mailbox.
Once a delivery and an A/R invoice are posted, unwinding a wrong line means a return, a credit note, a stock correction and a conversation. Catching it at intake costs a click.
Nothing changes inside B1. The order simply arrives in Shopify already read, matched, priced and checked.
Forward the email to your dedicated LevelOps address, or upload the file from the Shopify admin. No portal to sell to your buyer, no template to maintain per sender.
Items, quantities, units of measure, requested dates, currency, terms and the customer PO number come off the document, then each line is matched against your Shopify catalogue.
The result is a standard Shopify draft order with the source document attached. Your rep checks the flags, corrects what needs correcting, and approves. Nothing exists before that.
Once approved it is an ordinary Shopify order, so your partner connector, B1if scenario or Service Layer integration creates the sales order on the mapping you already trust. The document flow continues in B1.
This is the honest shape of the integration. LevelOps writes to Shopify natively, and there is no native SAP Business One connector. If you need direct B1 output today, we are not the right fit and we would rather tell you now.
The field level boundary between the document, Shopify and Business One.
Extraction happens before anything is created, so a bad document never becomes a posted delivery.
A validated draft order built from your Shopify data rather than the PDF.
Whatever your integration already maps. These orders are not a special case.
The limits are part of the design.
In a Business One shop, B1 is the item master and Shopify carries the sellable catalogue, with prices and stock kept in step by your integration. PDF to Order matches against the Shopify catalogue on purpose, because a matched line then points at something your integration can carry back into a B1 sales order without a manual fix.
The consequence is worth stating before you buy. If your buyers order items that exist in B1 but are not published to Shopify, those lines are flagged for a person rather than matched. That is the safe behaviour, and it usually surfaces a sync scope decision that has not been revisited in years. Widening the item scope, or agreeing that those items are genuinely off catalogue and belong on a quote, is short work.
Customer part numbers are where B1 users feel the difference most. Business Partner Catalog Numbers are the right hygiene and we would never tell you to abandon them, but they only cover codes somebody has already recorded. Matching handles the buyer's own references, abbreviations and loose descriptions directly, with a confidence score, so a code nobody has seen before still resolves on the first order. Pricing works the same way: the price on a purchase order is a claim, and the draft is priced from the account's Shopify price list instead. That only holds if your B1 price lists and special prices are mirrored into Shopify, so we check that alignment in the audit and tell you plainly where it has drifted.
The app can start on its own. Where the B1 side needs work, that is an implementation engagement with a defined scope.
We sample the purchase orders your team processed last month, group them by business partner and format, and estimate real coverage from your own documents.
We compare the B1 item master against the Shopify catalogue, and B1 price lists and special prices against your Shopify company price lists. Gaps are listed in priority order.
Start with the business partners who send the most and the messiest documents. Your team reviews every draft, corrections train the matching, and you measure against your own baseline.
If your Shopify to B1 mapping, warehouse setup or master data is what actually slows orders down, that is an ERP implementation and integration engagement rather than an app problem.
Implementation and integration work is delivered fixed fee with defined milestones by a bilingual team based in Montreal. Detail at /en/erp-implementation.
All four are ways of getting an emailed purchase order into Business One. They differ in who does the reading.
| Manual entry in B1 | B1 add on or scripting | EDI programme | LevelOps PDF to Order | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads any PO layout without configuration | A person does | Per template | Per partner mapping | Yes |
| Matches buyer part numbers and loose text | From memory | Only mapped codes | Mapped up front | Yes |
| Applies the account's contracted price | If the rep remembers | Sometimes | Yes | Yes |
| Human approval before the order exists | Yes | Depends on the build | Usually automatic | Yes |
| Survives an upgrade or a layout change | People adapt | Recheck and rework | Change request | No template to break |
| Needs B1 development or an add on | No | Yes | Usually | No |
| Needs inbound access to your B1 server | No | No | Often | No |
| Time to first live order | Immediate, forever | Months | Months per partner | Days |
Rated 5.0 on the Shopify App Store. Different ERPs, the same Shopify first pattern.
It is literally reading my PDF and uploading a 100+ item order in under 4 minutes. This just made us 10x more efficient.
After using LevelOps for three months, the percentage of email PDF orders requiring manual entry has dropped to under 10%, down from 60% prior to adopting the tool.
We considered multiple options before choosing LevelOps, including developing our own software. We chose LevelOps because their demo clearly showed they had already done the hard work of reading and transmitting data from disparate files into Shopify.
Such a timesaver and super easy to implement. We process purchase orders via EDI, PDF, Excel or email and the entire process has been seamless.
Not with a native B1 connector, and we would rather say that now than during an implementation. LevelOps PDF to Order writes validated draft orders into Shopify. The B1 sales order is then created by whatever Shopify to Business One integration you already run, whether that is a partner connector, a B1if scenario or a Service Layer integration your team built. If B1 has to be the direct destination with no Shopify step, we are not the right fit yet.
All of them, because we never touch B1. Partner connectors, middleware platforms, B1if integration framework scenarios and custom builds on the DI API or the B1 Service Layer all consume ordinary Shopify orders. An approved draft order becomes an ordinary Shopify order, so nothing about your mapping needs to change.
No, and it is a good reason to prefer this pattern. Nothing needs inbound access to your B1 server, because LevelOps only writes to Shopify. Your existing integration continues to reach out from inside your network exactly as it does today, so there is no new port, no new tunnel and no new attack surface to review with IT.
They are worth maintaining in B1, but matching does not depend on them. PDF to Order resolves the buyer's own part numbers, abbreviations and free text descriptions against your Shopify catalogue with a confidence score, so a customer code that was never recorded in B1 still matches on the first order. Anything genuinely ambiguous is flagged for a person instead of being resolved to a default.
The system that holds the price your customer was promised should apply it. If your B1 price lists and business partner special prices are reflected in Shopify B2B catalogues and company price lists, PDF to Order applies the account price automatically and ignores the price printed on the PDF. Where they have drifted, we flag it in the audit, because a price set at intake and corrected in B1 later is a credit note waiting to happen.
No. The whole marketing document flow stays in B1: the sales order, the delivery, the A/R invoice, the journal entries and the numbering series. We only remove the typing that happens before the sales order exists, so your document flow, approval procedures and authorisations are untouched.
Indirectly, and it depends on your integration. Extracted values such as the customer PO number, requested delivery date and buyer notes are written onto the Shopify order, and most Shopify to B1 integrations can map Shopify order fields and attributes into B1 UDFs. If a specific UDF is critical to your process, tell us during the audit so we confirm the field is captured before you commit.
Not at all. The database and the analytics behind it are entirely on the B1 side of the boundary. Intake happens in Shopify, so HANA, SQL Server, on premise and hosted deployments all behave identically from our side.
Routing stays with your integration. If it already sends Shopify orders to the right B1 company, warehouse and currency, these orders follow the same rules because they are ordinary Shopify orders. What we do capture from the document is the currency and terms the buyer stated, so a mismatch with the account setup is visible at review rather than after posting.
Send us three real POs, including your worst scan and your largest multi page order. We run them live and show the extraction, the matched lines and the flagged exceptions. Every store also gets your first 5 orders free, with no expiry before any commitment.
How our team scopes ERP integration and implementation work.
Read, match, price, approve, in detail.
Where EDI earns its cost, and where email intake is cheaper.
The same Shopify first pattern for a full cloud ERP.
The category, and what to look for before you buy.
The real cost of the status quo, line by line.
Send three real POs, including the worst scan you have. We run them live against a copy of your catalogue and show you the draft orders, the matched lines and the exceptions, before you decide anything.
your first 5 orders free, free allowance of 5 orders, bilingual support in English and French.
