How Jeffrey Stein Sales made integration the backbone of high-volume distribution.
Jeffrey Stein Sales is a long-established South African toy and hobby distributor, operating since the 1970s. The business supplies into around 300 stores nationwide, including major retailers and independent outlets, and supports multiple online storefronts. Toy products now account for roughly 80% of the business, placing Jeffrey Stein Sales among the top three or four distributors in the country.
10,000 to 15,000 line items, all captured by hand
By around 2010, Jeffrey Stein Sales was growing quickly, but many core processes were still manual. Customers placed orders by hand and faxed them through; the team then captured orders, invoices, credit notes, and supplier documents one by one. At the volumes Jeffrey Stein Sales was handling, this meant processing around 10,000 to 15,000 line items manually, making invoicing slow, error-prone, and a drain on staff time that should have been spent on sales.
The admin workload was a ceiling on growth. The team knew that to scale without proportionally scaling headcount, they needed automation at the core of the order process.
Website orders delivered straight into accounting
Jeffrey Stein Sales adopted Flowgear in 2011, making them one of Flowgear's longest-standing customers. The decision was, as Systems Manager Clint du Plessis describes it, born out of necessity.
One of the most impactful integrations has been connecting the website ordering system directly to Sage Evolution. Instead of orders arriving by fax and being re-keyed by hand, customers now log onto the website and Flowgear retrieves the order data in the background, populating Sage Evolution automatically. Flowgear also processes supplier invoices, some with as many as 500 line items, and automatically generates corresponding sales orders.
Manual capture eliminated, thousands of hours returned
Automating the website-to-accounting flow removed a major manual capture step, letting the team process high volumes more reliably and with far fewer errors. Jeffrey Stein Sales estimates the change has saved thousands of hours over the course of the relationship, freeing the business to channel energy into sales and growth rather than repetitive admin.
- Thousands of hours saved over the course of the integration
- Online orders flow directly into Sage Evolution without manual re-keying
- Supplier invoices with up to 500 line items processed automatically
- Staff time redirected from data capture to customer service and sales
“It's just literally the time saved since we've been doing business together. It's immeasurable, the number of hours that we've saved has been huge.”
New storefronts, same integration layer
Jeffrey Stein Sales continues to expand its online footprint, including additional websites and a newer storefront focused on new brands. The approach remains consistent: when a new operational need appears, automation is used to keep the business efficient as it grows.
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