The Company
Prostock Athletic Supply has been supplying top-quality baseball, softball, school sporting equipment and uniforms to the Lower Mainland and beyond for over four decades.
With their deep roots and strong connections with teams, schools, and athletes in the area, their commitment to the community goes beyond offering the best gear. They’re passionate about fostering a love for the game and ensuring players of all levels have what they need to succeed.
Prostock is more than just a sports gear retailer. They’re part of the local sports family, proudly supporting young athletes at every stage, from finding their first glove to equipping championship-winning teams.
The Challenge
As a lifelong sports enthusiast himself, keeping the company legacy alive was important for the owner and operator when he acquired the company in early 2026. Part of that meant facing roughly $300,000 worth of unprocessed invoices, with some dating as far back to July of the prior year.
In addition, with the purchase of the business came a decades-old, non-standard ERP, the central software system used to manage the company’s inventory, sales, financial data, and other day-to-day operations. It proved considerably harder to integrate with than a modern system like QuickBooks Online.
The owner soon realized that manually keying in purchase orders, receiving them, matching invoices, and processing AP was a fulltime job. While considering the option of hiring an AP clerk, the owner also began evaluating AI automation options.
One vendor demoed a slick tool that performed well in a controlled setting. When it came time for real-world use however, the automations quickly broke down. Growing skeptical of AI automation in general, the owner’s worries weren’t lessened when the other vendors he spoke with offered vague, open-ended promises to “build a solution”, with payment required up front and no concrete product to evaluate.
The owner was left feeling unconvinced about what the broad umbrella term “AI” meant with regards to creating real, tangible results for his business.
The Solution
Having an actual defined product: an email based agent, rather than an open-ended promise to build something, immediately set the owner’s mind at ease when he first met with Agent Aech.
Knowing exactly what was being purchased and how to interact with it, through email, the same way the owner already interacted with everyone else at work was central to earning his trust in an unfamiliar category.
Having Aech’s team come on-site and meet the Prostock team in person also stood out, offering a level of hands-on support and personal connection that’s increasingly rare in a market crowded with virtual providers.
Aech’s engineers were also able to create a customized workaround for the early hiccups of integration with the outdated ERP system, building a truly customized solution from start to finish.
The resulting system now handles both purchase orders and AP invoices arriving by email, with a cost structure that scales with computing power rather than headcount.
“With Agent Aech, there was a concept of what it was doing rather than just, ‘it’s AI.’”
The Results
A $300,000 backlog cleared
Apart from moving to a fully paperless accounting process, Prostock's major win was cutting down a near full-time job to a fraction of the hours: what was previously a 20–30 hour per week job (30 during the initial backlog crunch) is now handled with 10–12 hours of manual work remaining weekly, with 60–70% of invoices fully automated. The goal going forward is 85–90% automation coverage, which could bring remaining manual work down to roughly 3 hours a week.
A cost structure that scales with volume, not headcount
To date, roughly 1,200 emails have been processed spanning both purchase orders and AP invoices. As the system is tuned, performance has been consistently improving. Because the system scales with computing power rather than staff, volume can grow without adding headcount.