How to Automate Plunet

A Plunet order breaks into an item for each language combination

Translation agencies run their quotes, projects, vendors and invoices through Plunet BusinessManager, and the language departments of corporations and institutions use it too. Agencies choose between AgencyStart, AgencyPlus and AgencyAdvanced, and corporate language teams buy the Enterprise edition.

A request comes in through the customer portal or by email and becomes a quote, and the quote becomes an order whose items are its language combinations, each with its own workflow of jobs. Assigning a freelance translator or a partner agency to a job generates the purchase order they receive, and they answer job requests in the vendor portal.

Plunet also keeps the receivables and payables, collective invoices and credit notes included, and from AgencyPlus up it connects to CAT tools such as Trados Studio, memoQ, Phrase and XTM. Project managers, vendor managers, account managers and finance each work their own part of it.

A quote left at Sent stays there until an account manager chases it

Requests do not all come through the portal. A prospect emails at ten past four asking for a forty-thousand-word manual in four languages by month end, and until someone acknowledges it and opens a quote request in Plunet, the enquiry exists only in the sales inbox.

Then quotes go quiet. A quote sits at Sent for two weeks because the account manager had no list of who still needed a nudge, and a client who ordered every month last year has not placed a project since the summer.

Finance works across two systems. Plunet's reminders, if switched on, go out on their deadlines, but before anyone chases a client by email, someone checks QuickBooks for the payment. Vendor invoices land in QuickBooks too, and each one should match the purchase order Plunet issued, by reference and by amount.

The AutomationManager can take a portal request to quote, order and assignment

Bought as a separate module and set up with a Plunet implementation specialist, the AutomationManager turns a customer portal request into a quote and an order and, since version 9.1, starts the assignment round, so a project can run with little help from a project manager.

Assignment rounds offer a job to vendors manually, first come first served or top ranked, and assigning a vendor generates the purchase order sent to them. Up to three payment reminders can go out automatically on the deadlines a company sets, each extending the due date. For payables, Plunet's own best practice has finance check each job against the vendor's invoice and set it to Invoice checked before a payable is created.

Plunet connects to MT engines and AI tools, LLMs included, and the Plunet API comes with AgencyAdvanced and Enterprise.

Those automations start from the portal and from Plunet's own records. An enquiry emailed to sales never passes through the AutomationManager, a quote stays at Sent until someone moves it, and at agencies that book payments in QuickBooks, whether a client has paid is answered there rather than in Plunet.

The 8 a.m. quote list covers every quote still at Sent after two days

Every quote still at Sent two days after it went out gets a follow-up drafted in Gmail the next morning, giving its reference, language pair and amount, and a post in the Slack sales channel lists them for the account managers to send.

An emailed enquiry becomes a quote request in Plunet within minutes, carrying the prospect's name, language pair and deadline, a note on where it came from, and the sales rep for that language pair or region. A Slack message tags the rep, and the reply acknowledging the prospect waits among the rep's Gmail drafts.

On Mondays the account managers see which clients with work in the last year have had nothing delivered for 30 days, high-volume accounts marked, each with a drafted check-in that mentions the last project and the usual language pairs. Finance sees each overdue Plunet invoice that QuickBooks confirms is unpaid, skipping any chased in the past week, with a reminder drafted and the largest balances first.

Finance's Monday report also matches each vendor invoice in QuickBooks to its Plunet purchase order by reference and lists the differences beyond tolerance and the invoices with no PO.

Plunet still issues its own purchase orders and payment reminders

Plunet still sends its purchase order on assignment and its own payment reminders, so the PO drafts and the invoice chaser suit finance teams that issue POs by email or chase from Gmail. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, and here it uses a Plunet user together with QuickBooks, Gmail and Slack.

Only the enquiry job writes into Plunet, adding the quote request. Account managers, project managers and finance send every client and vendor email themselves, from drafts in Gmail.

Agencies that deliver from Smartcat can add the delivery confirmations, which read the delivered project there and the client contact in Plunet.