Jeffrey Stein Sales: Automating Online Orders Into Accounting and Saving Thousands of Hours
Jeffrey Stein Sales is a long-established South African toy and hobby distributor, operating since the 1970s. Today, the business supplies into around 300 stores nationwide, including major retailers and independent outlets, and supports multiple online storefronts, including Jeffrey Stein Sales. Toy products now account for roughly 80% of the business, and Jeffrey Stein Sales is among the top three or four distributors in the country.
“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”
Manual Processing at High Volume
By around 2010, Jeffrey Stein Sales was on a steep growth trajectory as its reach expanded and it supplied more and more stores. But many core processes were still manual. Customers placed orders by hand and faxed them through, and the team then captured orders, invoices, credit notes, and supplier documents manually. At Jeffrey Stein Sales’s volume, this meant managing around 10,000 to 15,000 line items, making invoicing and document processing slow, labor-intensive, and prone to mistakes. The admin workload also pulled time away from sales and growth. Clint du Plessis joined the business in 2004 and remembers how operational knowledge was often learned on the job. Over time, the team realized they needed to automate key workflows to keep scaling efficiently.
Website Ordering Integrated With the Accounting System
Jeffrey Stein Sales adopted Flowgear in 2011, making them one of Flowgear’s longest-standing customers. The decision was, as Clint describes it, “born out of necessity” as the company looked for practical ways to remove manual work, reduce errors, and free up time for higher-value activity. Over that time, one of the most impactful integrations has been connecting Jeffrey Stein Sales’s website ordering system to its accounting system. Instead of orders arriving via fax and being re-keyed by hand, customers now log onto the website, place orders directly, and Flowgear retrieves the order data in the background and populates the accounting system automatically.
Faster Processing, Fewer Errors, More Focus on Sales
Automating the website-to-accounting flow delivered immediate and sustained efficiency gains. The move removed a major manual capture step, helping the team process high volumes more reliably and reduce the risk of costly mistakes that can happen when product codes and quantities are captured manually. 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.
Supporting New Storefronts and Future Needs
Jeffrey Stein Sales continues to expand its online footprint, including additional websites and a newer storefront focused on new brands. While integration priorities typically get reviewed after peak season, 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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