From peak season chaos to complete control
Stokes Seeds’ Journey with SalesPad for BC
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Order visibility across all queues
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Zero-touch order fulfillment
Years partnering with SalesPad for continuous workflow automation from GP to BC
“I don’t think I even justify the ROI on buying a product like SalesPad because the cost of not having it would probably be 10 times what it is to have it.”
Mark Andres, Director of operations at stokes seeds
The company
About Stokes Seeds
Stokes Seeds has supplied North American agriculture for more than 130 years. Today, their distribution network stretches coast-to-coast across Canada and covers the United States east of the Mississippi. Customers range from home gardeners and roadside stands to farms growing over a thousand acres. Each season brings massive operational complexity: 7,000 orders, 5,000 SKUs, and over 300,000 individual sales lines spanning 250-seed packets up to bulk orders of millions. Stokes Seeds has relied on SalesPad since 2014 to orchestrate this volume. Real-time visibility of their sales process and automated workflows allow teams to track every order through the warehouse, handle massive seasonal spikes, and protect margins against fluctuating seed costs and pricing discrepancies.
The Challenge
Extreme seasonality, forecast-driven purchasing, and narrow margins
In commercial agriculture, timing is everything. A 24-hour shipping delay can ruin a grower’s planting window or lose an entire harvest to sudden frost. For Stokes Seeds, this pressure is intensified by extreme seasonality, with roughly 90% of their annual sales volume occurring between December and May. Meeting this demand requires committing $4.6M to $7M upfront on forecast alone, purchasing bulk inventory without a single customer pre-order in hand.
Historically, teams navigated this rush through disconnected spreadsheets, paper trails, and fragmented ERP screens. When growers called with urgent planting deadlines, staff had to chase paper tickets or physically walk warehouse bays just to find a pallet. Without unified visibility, morning meetings dragged on for hours simply trying to determine what orders existed, where they sat, and what needed to ship that day.
Fulfillment was further complicated by strict compliance rules and razor-thin margins. Supplier contracts barred specific seeds from crossing regional borders, while specialized varieties demanded signed waivers and chemical permits before shipping. With distributor margins capped around 20%–25%, a single pricing error or missed rebate immediately ate away profitability.
Compounding everything, the approaching sunset of Microsoft Dynamics GP required migrating to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central without disrupting a single customer during their busiest season.
“It’s not uncommon for us to come in on a Monday and see a thousand orders, and by Friday have 2,500, and by the following Friday have 3,500… If you don’t have visibility into where your order sits, into what state of your workflow it is… it’s busy, it’s hectic. That ability to cut through the noise and say, ‘What am I working on today? What orders matter?’—you can’t underscore that enough.”
Scott Pluggers
Chief Financial and Operations Officer
The Solution
Automating the order journey from intake to invoice with complete visibility
Stokes Seeds paired Business Central with SalesPad to replace manual spreadsheets and paper trails with real-time order visibility and automated, rules-based routing, ensuring time-sensitive shipments reach growers accurately and on schedule.
End-to-end order visibility with Sales Monitor eliminates blind spots
Stokes Seeds replaced paper trails and disconnected spreadsheets with Sales Monitor, a live dashboard in SalesPad Mission Control providing visibility across all quotes, orders, invoices, and returns. Orders flow through 20+ queues that map out their exact sales process, including New Order, Future Ship, Hold for Lot Assign, and Invoicing, allowing teams to pinpoint any order’s physical warehouse bay and status in seconds.
“I only have to look at one screen compared to going to look at 20 screens, 30 screens. I can go to the Sales Monitor, look at it in five minutes, and know where we’re at for the day.”
Luke Wallis
US Operations Manager
No-code workflows catch errors before orders reach the warehouse
Stokes Seeds embedded automated business rules into their sales process to stop orders exceeding credit limits, lacking approved payment terms, or missing mandatory crop waivers and chemical permits. Because the rules engine is completely no-code, business users can configure, test, and publish new rules in under 30 seconds without filing IT tickets or waiting on developer cycles.
Real-time margin checks protect profitability before orders ship
Business rules evaluate every sales line against gross margin thresholds, flagging low-margin items before release. The rules engine catches zero-priced lines, mismatched discount schedules, and unexpected vendor cost fluctuations between fall pre-bookings and spring shipments, routing exceptions to executive leadership for review before inventory is touched.
Automated billing and payment capture ensure seed never ships unpaid
Through native PayFabric integration, credit card payments are captured as orders enter fulfillment, eliminating manual pre-authorizations and credit risk. Once shipping verification is complete, clean orders post directly to invoices in Business Central without manual data entry.
Migrating from Dynamics GP to Business Central without seasonal downtime
When Stokes Seeds transitioned from Dynamics GP to Business Central, SalesPad provided an intuitive, uninterrupted workflow layer. Non-technical operations leaders could configure and test order paths in real time before cutover, allowing customer service and warehouse teams to maintain full fulfillment speed from day one with zero disruption to growers.
“The decision point for SalesPad into Business Central was really the ease of implementation and the ability for us to look at our workflow and redesign it in real time. You don’t have to slow down and wait for developers… You can do it in the same day, keep testing, keep moving.”
Scott Pluggers
Chief Financial and Operations Officer
Whether staying on Dynamics GP or planning a migration to Business Central, Cavallo grows with your business. Learn more through our commitment to Dynamics GP or explore SalesPad for BC.
The Results
100% order accuracy and 85% hands-free fulfillment during peak season
With SalesPad providing real-time visibility and workflow automation inside Business Central, Stokes Seeds turned peak season into a controlled, scalable operation, fulfilling orders with pinpoint accuracy while protecting their bottom line:
100% on-time, flawless order fulfillment
Stokes Seeds maintains a verified 100% on-time fulfillment rate and 100% order accuracy across all U.S. and Canadian operations, ensuring commercial growers receive critical seed shipments precisely when weather windows open.
“What sets Stokes apart from our competition is our 100% order fulfillment accuracy, so our customers can be 100% confident that when they order from us, they are getting exactly what they ordered.”
Matthew Segenese
Principal Business Solutions Architect
Immediate call resolution through live order visibility
Customer service reps can answer urgent inbound grower inquiries in seconds directly from a single screen. Teams no longer have to place customers on hold, track down paperwork, or walk warehouse bays to confirm order progress.
Peak season scale with a lean team
Stokes Seeds successfully processes 6,000 to 9,000 complex commercial orders, spanning 5,000 SKUs and more than 300,000 unique sales lines, in a compressed five-month window without ballooning operational headcount.
85%+ zero-touch order fulfillment
Over 85% of standard seasonal orders flow directly from intake to posted invoices without requiring manual intervention, freeing teams to focus only on exceptions and customer relationships.
Protected profitability across every order
Stokes Seeds eliminated pricing errors, missed discounts, and unrecovered supplier price increases, ensuring advance fall pre-bookings deliver their projected margins at spring fulfillment.
