Unicorn PO Dispenser: purchase orders in a dozen formats, turned into clean records

UNICORN is a Massachusetts women-owned distributor led by Ellen Cynar. Growth brought a problem that got worse the faster the business moved: purchase orders arriving from every customer in a different shape, as PDFs, as forwarded emails, as portal exports, each one demanding manual re-entry into the CRM, the accounting system, and a shared billing inbox. Every order was a chance for a typo, and every afternoon disappeared into retyping.

The Unicorn PO Dispenser takes the order in whatever form it arrives, extracts the fields, validates them against what the business already knows, flags anything that does not add up for a person to decide, and then files a clean record where it belongs: the CRM and the books. Nobody retypes. A human still approves anything unusual, which is the point.

The lab’s Stephen Walter led design, development, and project management, co-designing the workflow with Ellen and her team around how they actually work rather than around a vendor’s template. The app is live in production, processing real purchase orders day to day and scaling alongside the business it was built to keep up with.