AI Sales Order Entry in Epicor Kinetic: Held Orders vs Staged Review
Two ways an AI order-entry tool keeps a person in charge in Epicor Kinetic: create the order on hold, or keep a draft outside Epicor until it is approved. How each works and when each fits.
Gonzalo Nuñez
Chief Technology Officer
An AI order-entry tool can keep a person in charge of Epicor Kinetic sales orders in one of two ways. It can create the order in Kinetic on hold and let a person release it, or it can keep a draft outside Epicor and create the order only when a person approves it. Both keep a person in charge. Held orders put review inside Order Entry. Staged review keeps Kinetic free of anything unreviewed and gives discrepancies and approvals a place of their own.
Held orders: review inside Kinetic
The tool reads the purchase order, creates the sales order in Kinetic through the REST API and puts it on hold. Fields it is unsure of are flagged, usually in a comment or a user field, and a person opens the order in Order Entry, fixes what is wrong and takes it off hold. Lowki's Lexi works this way.
What it does well:
- No second screen. The order desk reviews in Order Entry, where it already works.
- Early visibility. The order exists as soon as the email is read, so customer service can find it straight away.
- A simple handover. Releasing the hold is the approval, and it is a step every Epicor user already knows.
What to watch:
- Unreviewed orders are real orders. They carry order numbers and appear in Order Entry, trackers, BAQs and dashboards that do not filter on the hold.
- Corrections are edits to a live order. Fixing a part or a unit means changing order lines in Kinetic, after the fact.
- Rejected work has to be cleaned up. A resent purchase order or a quote request read as an order becomes an order to delete or void.
- One gate. Release is a single decision by whoever can take the order off hold. A pricing or credit sign-off stays manual.
- Finding what needs attention. Reviewers need a way to list the held orders that came from the tool and see what was flagged on each, usually a BAQ.
Staged review: approve before Epicor
The tool reads the purchase order, resolves it against live Epicor data and keeps the result as a draft in its own review queue. Each difference sits on the line it belongs to as a warning: a part number it could not match, a price that differs from Epicor, a unit that is not valid for the part, a PO number that already exists on another order. A person approves, corrects or rejects the draft, and only then is the order created in Kinetic, through Epicor's own business logic. Fluent works this way.
What it does well:
- Kinetic only holds approved orders. Planners, buyers and reports never see an unreviewed one.
- Discrepancies are triaged in one place. The reviewer works through warnings line by line and leaves the rest of the order alone.
- Approval can have stages. A draft can go to the order desk, then to pricing or credit, with reassignment and out-of-office coverage, before Epicor sees it.
- Rejected drafts disappear. Nothing is left to delete in Kinetic.
- Epicor still validates. The order is created through Kinetic's business logic, so it meets the same rules as one keyed by hand.
What to watch:
- A second screen. The order desk reviews in the queue, then works the order in Kinetic as usual.
- The queue has to move. An order is not in Kinetic until it is approved, so review time matters. On Fluent, the median review across 25,359 documents in the 90 days to 1 September 2026 was 55 seconds.
Comparison
| Held orders in Kinetic | Staged review before Kinetic | |
|---|---|---|
| Where unreviewed orders live | In Kinetic, on hold | In the tool's review queue |
| Order number assigned | When the email is read | When the draft is approved |
| How discrepancies are shown | Flags on the order, found by the reviewer | Warnings on each line of the draft |
| Corrections | Edits to the live order | Edits to the draft before it is written |
| Rejected or duplicate orders | Deleted or voided in Kinetic | Rejected in the queue; nothing reaches Kinetic |
| Approval | One release by a person | Stages, reassignment and out-of-office coverage |
| Epicor validation | When the order is created | When the approved order is created |
| Example | Lowki (Lexi) | Fluent |
Questions to ask any vendor
- Where does an order wait before a person approves it?
- How does a reviewer see what the tool was unsure of, line by line?
- What happens to a duplicate PO or a document that was not an order?
- Can more than one person sign off, and can an order be reassigned when someone is away?
- Does the order go through Epicor's own business logic when it is created?
- Is every field the tool read, and every decision it made, recorded?
How Fluent does it
Fluent's agents stage every document. For Order Entry, the draft shows the customer, ship-to, parts, prices and units resolved against live Epicor data, with every difference as a warning on its line and any existing order with the same customer PO number flagged. Approval workflows route drafts through the stages you define. When a draft is approved, the order is created in Kinetic, and the audit log records what was read and decided.
The same model runs on every screen Fluent covers, so AP invoices, receipts and cash receipts are reviewed in the same queue before they reach Epicor. See order entry automation, compare Fluent and Lowki, or book a demo to see a draft built from your own purchase orders.
Frequently Asked Questions
It can, as long as a person approves each order. Creating the order on hold keeps review inside Order Entry, but unreviewed orders exist in Kinetic and rejected ones have to be cleaned up. Staging a draft outside Epicor keeps Kinetic to approved orders only and allows approval stages before the order is created.
An order hold flags a sales order so it does not move on to fulfilment until someone releases it. The order still exists, with its number and lines, and appears in Order Entry and in reports that do not filter on the hold.
Staged review keeps each order the AI reads as a draft outside the ERP, with every difference shown as a warning on its line. A person approves, corrects or rejects the draft, and the order is created in Epicor only after approval.
Yes, with a staged tool. Fluent's approval workflows route a draft through the stages you define, for example the order desk and then pricing, with reassignment and out-of-office coverage, before the order is created in Kinetic.
Only if the queue sits unattended. Because every difference is already listed on its line, review is quick: on Fluent, the median review across 25,359 documents in the 90 days to 1 September 2026 was 55 seconds.
Yes, unless the report or BAQ filters on the hold. Held orders are sales orders like any other, so trackers, dashboards and exports include them by default.
