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Bring your past orders across with AI

By Andrew Hemphill · 8 October 2026

Moving to Puree from another catering app? You don’t have to leave your history behind. Give your old order PDFs to your AI assistant, and it files each one against the right customer in Puree: the customer, the contact, the delivery address, the PDF itself and a short record of the event. Next time that customer rings, their history is already there.

Who this is for

Caterers who are switching to Puree and have their old quotes or orders as PDFs, exported or printed from the app they used before. It works just as well for ten orders as for a few hundred, a batch at a time.

What you need

  • An AI assistant connected to Puree with Sign in to Puree: Claude, ChatGPT or Grok. If you haven’t connected yet, start with Connecting with an AI Agent.
  • Access to customers and orders. When you connect, leave Read customers, Change customers, Read orders and Change orders ticked. Past orders and their PDFs come under Orders, even though the note beside Change orders only mentions notes, docket instructions and documents. Without it your assistant can’t add past orders or their PDFs. If those boxes are missing, ask your account owner.
  • Your old order PDFs. One order per PDF works best. Through your assistant, each PDF can be up to 5 MB. A bigger one can be added in Puree itself, which takes PDFs up to 25 MB.

What your assistant will do

For each PDF, one at a time, your assistant:

  1. Reads the PDF for the customer, the contact, the delivery address, the event date, the number of guests, the total and the order number.
  2. Finds or adds the customer. It searches Puree first, so you don’t end up with the same customer twice. If it isn’t sure whether two names are the same customer, it asks you.
  3. Finds or adds the contact. A name and a phone number are enough. An email address is added if the PDF has one. A contact without an email is simply never emailed.
  4. Finds or adds the delivery address. Every address on a customer in Puree is a delivery address. The customer’s official address, the one on their invoices, stays as it is.
  5. Adds a past order to the customer, with the event date, a short description, the number of guests, the total, the name of your old app and the old order number.
  6. Attaches the PDF to the past order. It also shows under the customer’s Documents, so it’s only added once. Both are for your team only. Your customer doesn’t see them.

Before it starts, it shows you what it found and waits for you to say yes. At the end, it gives you a table of every PDF and what it did with it.

What it won’t do

  • It doesn’t create real orders. A past order is a record of something that already happened. It never appears in your sales reports, calendar, kitchen reports, dockets or invoicing, and it’s never sent to Xero or QuickBooks.
  • It doesn’t email anyone. No quotes, confirmations or newsletters go out to your customers.
  • It doesn’t delete or archive anything. If it finds something odd, such as a customer that looks like a duplicate, it tells you rather than tidying it up.
  • It doesn’t add the same order twice. Each past order carries your old app’s name and its order number, and Puree won’t hold two past orders with the same pair. If you run the same PDFs through again, your assistant skips the ones already finished, and adds the PDF to any past order that was created before a run stopped.

Seeing a customer’s history afterwards

Ask your assistant about a customer’s orders and it looks in two places: orders in Puree, and past orders from before Puree. When it looks a customer up, Puree tells it how many past orders they have and when the latest was, so it knows to check. It shows them as two separate lists, In Puree and Before Puree. Past orders are never added into your sales, revenue or averages.

The prompt to give your assistant

Start a new chat, attach a batch of PDFs (ten to twenty at a time is a good size), and paste in the text below. Change the first line to the name of the app you’re moving from.

I'm moving to Puree from [name of my old catering app]. The attached PDFs are my past orders from that app. Please bring each one into Puree as a past order. Do not create any real quotes or orders.

First, before changing anything:
1. Call get_account and tell me which Puree account you're working in.
2. Read every PDF. For each one, note: the customer (company or person), the contact's name, phone and email, the delivery address, the event date, a short description of the event, the number of guests, the total and its currency, and the order number.
3. Show me a table of what you found, one row per PDF, and flag anything you couldn't read or aren't sure about. Ask me once whether new contacts should be on my email list. Wait for me to say yes before you change anything.

Then work through the PDFs one at a time:
4. Already done? Call list_past_orders with source_system "[name of my old catering app]" and external_reference set to the order number. If it finds one for the same customer, look at its documents: if the PDF is there, skip this PDF and tell me it was already done; if it has no PDF, don't create it again, go straight to step 9 and attach the PDF. If it's for a different customer, stop and ask me.
5. Customer: search_customers before creating. If one customer clearly matches, use it. If more than one might match, or a match is only close (a different spelling, a different branch), ask me. Only create_customer when there's no match.
6. Contact: check the customer's contacts (get_customer, or search_contacts with the customer_id and search set to the phone number, then to the name). A contact needs at least one of an email or a phone: a name and a phone number are enough for create_contact; add the email only if the PDF has one. Send email_subscribed: false unless I said new contacts should be on my email list.
7. Delivery address: use one of the customer's existing addresses if it's the same place. Otherwise create_address on the customer. Every customer address is a delivery address. Don't change the customer's official_address.
8. Past order: create_past_order with the customer, event_date (YYYY-MM-DD, required), description (one short line), guest_count, total_in_cents (the total as printed, in cents: 4,500.00 is 450000), source_system "[name of my old catering app]" (spelt exactly the same every time) and external_reference (the order number). Only send currency (three capital letters, like AUD) if the PDF's currency isn't my account's; if a PDF just says "$" and you can't tell which dollar, ask me. If Puree answers 409, that order is already there: read it with get_past_order and check it has the same customer, source_system and external_reference. If anything differs, stop and ask me. If it matches, attach the PDF only if it has none.
9. PDF: request_upload with purpose document, get the PDF into the link it returns, wait until get_upload says ready, then attach_past_order_document with the past order's id and the upload_id. Don't also attach it to the customer: attaching it to the past order already puts it among the customer's documents.

Rules:
- Never archive, retire or delete anything.
- Never guess. Every past order needs its event date: if a date isn't clear, ask me, or set that PDF aside. If a total or guest count isn't clear, leave it out and tell me. If a PDF has no order number, ask me what to use before you look it up or create it.
- If something fails, tell me which PDF and why, then carry on with the next one. After a timeout, check with list_past_orders before retrying, so nothing is added twice.

When you're done, give me a summary table with one row per PDF: file name, customer (new or existing), contact (new or existing), address (new or existing), past order (created, skipped as already done, or failed), PDF added, and anything I need to check.

Your assistant may ask you to drop each PDF into an upload link, one at a time. That’s how a file from a chat reaches Puree without passing through the AI. Open the link it gives you (it lasts 15 minutes), drop the PDF in, and tell it when you’re done. An assistant that can run code may upload the PDF itself.

Checking the results in Puree

  • Open a customer from the summary table. Their Past orders section shows each one with its date, description, guests, total and PDF, and their Documents tab shows the PDF too.
  • Check the Activity log under Settings → API and AI access. It lists every customer, contact, address, document and past order your assistant added, in plain English.
  • Spot-check a few. Pick three or four PDFs and compare them with what’s in Puree, especially the totals and dates.

If something goes wrong

  • The same customer has been added twice. Merge them in Puree. See Merge Customers: Combine Duplicate Customer Records in Puree.
  • A PDF is over 5 MB. Let your assistant create the past order without it, then add the PDF in Puree yourself: open the customer’s Past orders, edit that past order and add the PDF there (up to 25 MB).
  • Your assistant says it hasn’t been given access. Disconnect Puree in your AI app and connect again, leaving Read customers, Change customers, Read orders and Change orders ticked. If they’re not there to tick, ask your account owner.
  • It stopped partway through a batch. Paste the prompt again with the same PDFs. Anything already finished is skipped, and a past order created without its PDF gets the PDF.
  • A total or date is wrong. Edit the past order in Puree, under the customer’s Past orders, or tell your assistant which one to fix.

Your old app’s customer list. If you can also export your customers as a spreadsheet, it’s often quickest to bring those in first and let your assistant match the PDFs to them. We’re happy to help with that: email email@puree.app.

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