Questions, Answered

Frequently Asked Questions

• What does STRYKE actually do?

  It does the typing, without the typos. Your customers send purchase orders by email, phone, fax, and EDI, and your vendors send invoices the same way. STRYKE, already trained on the orders your team entered before, reads each one, works out which of your parts, vendors, and accounts every line belongs to, and enters it in your ERP and your accounting software. Orders it’s sure about go in on their own. The rest wait in a short list for someone to confirm.

• Which systems does it work with?

  Any of them. Where the ERP has an API (JobBOSS², Epicor Kinetic, QuickBooks Online) STRYKE uses it; where it has an import file (Global Shop Solutions, ProShop, Sage 100 and most others) STRYKE writes that file. The books the same way. Nothing is installed in the ERP and nothing your customers or vendors do changes.

• How long does setup take?

  Hours, start to finish. Hour one, you send us 90 days of documents and the entries your team made from them. Hour two, STRYKE trains on them and you watch the replay. Hour three, we connect to your ERP and your accounting software and live orders start going in. There is no implementation project because there is nothing to configure. It learned your setup from your own history.

• How much does it actually save?

  Count your documents. Published benchmarks put a hand-keyed order at $7 to $21 and a vendor invoice at about $9, and each one takes about ten minutes of someone’s day. STRYKE is $500 a month, flat, for all of them. The replay tells you the exact number for your shop: it shows every document from your last 90 days that nobody would have had to type.

• What does “trained on our old POs” actually mean?

  Instead of starting from a generic catalog, STRYKE reads every purchase order and vendor invoice your team has ever processed, in whatever shape it arrived (PDF, scanned fax, a photo of a packing slip, a spreadsheet, an order typed into an email, EDI), side by side with what they entered. From that it learns how each customer writes your part numbers, which vendor bills to which account, what your prices and terms are, and what a normal order from each account looks like. There is no template to build and no format it has to be told about. It also comes out knowing each account’s rules: Riverbend ships to Dock 2 and wants the acknowledgment by end of day, Grandville Bar & Tube puts freight on the invoice, Macatawa Seating charges back an ASN that is more than an hour late. That is why it is right on day one, and why it gets better every time someone corrects a line.

• Does “no manual errors” mean it is never wrong?

  It means no error gets in by being retyped. A person keying an order copies the mistakes on the page, adds a few of their own, then does it again in accounting. STRYKE never retypes anything, checks every line against your own records, and holds anything it isn’t sure of for a one-click confirmation. When it isn’t confident, nothing goes in silently.

• We run our ERP and QuickBooks separately. Does that matter?

  That’s the problem STRYKE was built for. Right now most shops type the order into the ERP and then type it again into accounting. Same numbers, two systems, two chances to end up different. STRYKE reads the document once and enters it in both, so month-end stops being a hunt for why they disagree.

• Does it handle vendor invoices too, or only customer orders?

  Both, and both directions. Customer POs become sales orders and the invoices you send out. Vendor invoices become bills in accounts payable, matched to the PO and the receiver. What goes back out goes by itself from the same record: the 855 acknowledgment when the order posts, the 856 ASN when the packing list closes in your ERP, the 810 or an emailed PDF when the invoice posts, remittance advice when a vendor is paid. Nobody keys the invoice a third time into a customer portal.

• What do the buyer emails actually look like, and what does it do with them?

  Mostly five things, and STRYKE reads the email, not just the attachment. “Please find attached PO 48213, kindly acknowledge quantities, prices and ship date by EOD Thursday”: it enters the PO, checks the prices against your quote, and replies in the same thread with the acknowledgment and the ship date the buyer asked for. “Need 250 of the 4471-B by the 21st, PO to follow”: it enters the order from the body and flags that the PO is still owed. “On PO 48209 change line 2 from 40 to 60 and push to 10/28”: it updates the open sales order and sends a revised acknowledgment. “Can you pull 48209 in to Friday?”: it holds that one for a person, because a promise is a decision. “Following up, could you confirm the ship date?”: it answers from the order. Every reply goes out under your name and sits in the paper trail with the email it answered.

• Our automotive customers send releases, not POs. Does that work?

  Yes. 830 planning schedules and 862 shipping schedules come in the same door as an 850, and STRYKE turns the releases into orders and schedule changes against the blanket, acknowledges them, and sends the 856 when each shipment closes. Cumulative quantities, ship-to plants, and dock codes come from the release and are checked against what your ERP already has. The 820 remittance that comes back gets applied to AR.

• What does it catch that a person typing wouldn’t?

  Someone typing a document copies whatever it says. STRYKE checks it. It catches the same PO sent twice through two different channels, customer prices that don’t match your quote, vendor invoices that don’t match the PO and the receipt, wrong units of measure, old part revisions, and ship-to addresses that aren’t in your records. Those are the mistakes that usually cost you money.

• What happens when it gets a line wrong?

  Nothing goes in silently. Every document gets a confidence score, and anything below the line waits in a review list where your team confirms or corrects it in one click. That correction teaches it, so the list gets shorter month by month instead of handing you the same problem forever.

• Do my customers or vendors have to change anything?

  No. Email, phone, fax, EDI. Everything keeps arriving exactly the way it does today. There’s no portal to push onto your customers and no EDI setup project for your smaller accounts.

• Will this hold up in a quality audit?

  Yes, and that’s the point of keeping the chain of custody. Every document keeps the original it arrived as, what STRYKE read from it, how sure it was, any correction a person made, and both entries it produced. That’s one unbroken trail across both systems, covering the PO reference and intake record IATF 16949 and AS9100 ask for. IATF 16949 wants purchase orders and part approvals kept for as long as the part is active plus one calendar year unless your customer specifies longer, and automotive and aerospace customers usually do. STRYKE keeps them for as long as you tell it to.

• Where is our data kept, and what compliance do you meet?

  Your documents and the entries made from them are stored encrypted, in US data centers, and kept for as long as your customers’ quality requirements say. Electronic copies meet the IRS rules for scanned records: complete, indexed, retrievable, and legible on demand. If you hold defense work with DFARS or ITAR flow-downs, tell us before the replay so that data is handled in the right environment from the first document.

• How do I know it works before I buy?

  We replay your last 90 days of customer POs and vendor invoices and show you, line by line, what STRYKE would have entered in each system, what it would have held back, and where it would have been wrong. You judge it on your own paperwork instead of a demo built on somebody else’s.

• What does it cost?

  $500 a month. Not per document, not per seat, and not a number you have to sit through a sales call to hear.