When DJ TechTools launched in 2008, it was founded on a DIY ethos — a community of DJs modifying their equipment so it could do new, cool stuff, sharing and learning from each other.

When they made the jump to designing and selling their own equipment, that sense of creativity and innovation helped them quickly grow an audience and translated to great sales numbers.

But their DIY approach wasn’t doing them any favors when it came to operations, especially as their sales started to grow.

DJ TechTools were managing their wholesale and B2B orders with an increasingly complicated set of documents and spreadsheets. And because they were doing business all over the world, every country had a different set of requirements — VAT, specific invoice details, that kind of thing.

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We sell to so many different countries, and everyone has different needs for their commercial invoices. So we had multiple invoice forms going all over the world, and then I’d need to take those invoices and enter them into a Google sheet. It was super manual, and extremely time consuming.

Orders were running through Shopify, but everything else was being handled manually.

So the company’s Global Sales Director, Josh Olds, would make a sale. He’d find the right form for the customer’s location, to make sure the invoice included the proper formatting and details. Then out came his accounting calculator, going through each line item and adding it to the invoice — manually entering hundreds of SKUs, line by line.

And THEN he’d start tracking and managing the payments, complete with DIY excel formatting that turned a cell red if a customer hadn’t paid, and green when they had. If the customer asked for a PayPal link (which they often did), he’d send it over, and then try to remember it when it was time to reconcile their accounts.

Once a month Josh would get a request from the accounting team, asking him for payment details. Accounting would send a list of the invoice numbers they wanted to know about.  And of course the invoice numbers didn’t match up to the Shopify order numbers, so Josh had to go through and figure out which invoice went with which order, one by one.

“It was just so time-consuming,” he says. “It became very obvious that our DIY accounting and invoicing wasn’t working anymore.”

DJ TechTools needed a system — something that could bring order to the chaos of their orders and payments.

Josh knew there had to be a better way, he just didn’t know what it was.

So he started looking. The main thing he wanted? A way to generate invoices from Shopify orders.

Which is how he found Streamlined — where he got that, and a lot more. “At first,” says Josh. “I was looking for a company that would create a invoice for us from a Shopify order. And that was kind of it. I wasn't really looking for a payment system at that time. It just worked out really nicely that all of these things came together in Streamlined — AND it plugged into Shopify.”

It wasn’t what he was looking for, but as soon as he tried it, Josh knew he wasn’t looking back.

“Setup was really easy,” says Josh. “As soon as I launched Streamlined I was just like, ‘Okay, this is great. We’re going to stick with this.’ And the pricing is more than fair to the service and to the amount of time you save.”

Now that Streamlined is set up, DJ TechTools have one system that works for both domestic and international customers — and their invoicing and AR can essentially run themselves.

As soon as an order is generated in Shopify, the invoice is automatically created in Streamlined — complete with all the location-specific details different customers need, including sales tax, payment instructions, and tracking info.

It’s not that I was incapable of creating invoices or POs, but the time suck prevented me from focusing on important things like growth. Using Streamlined has dramatically lowered my stress. I finally have the time to focus on growth and sales.

Streamlined manages everything that comes after the invoice, too: it all comes together in one system, so DJ TechTools can manage their entire B2B workflow in one place.

No matter where they’re based, Josh’s customers get a professional invoice that includes all the details they need, with a link to a global B2B checkout. From there their payments are processed, reconciled, and synced with their accounting software — which means no more monthly requests from accounting, they already have all the information they need.

Now, instead of spending all his time inputting SKU after SKU into the right invoice form — Josh is able to focus on sales and growth. The stuff he actually wants to be thinking about.

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