BlogRunning the place, updated
What your records have to be right about
Ask a software salesperson what to track and they will say everything. That is wrong, and expensive. A record nobody keeps current is worse than none, because people trust it until they learn not to. The useful question is which things would cost you real money this week if they were wrong. For most wholesale growers there are four.
The four records that matter
The first is what is actually ready, meaning what a buyer could take tomorrow, rather than what was potted, what the plan said or what was ready a fortnight ago. It goes stale fastest and does the most damage, because everything you quote and promise is built on it, and it is usually kept in the worst place, one person's head or a spreadsheet they update when there is time.
The second is what is already promised to someone else. Available and unsold is a different number from available, and double-selling happens in the gap. Most growers track this informally, which works at one size of business and fails at the next. If two people take orders and one has to ask the other what they have promised, you have the gap.
The third is size and container, written the same way every time. A #3 is a three gallon whichever way you write it, but if one person enters "Acer rubrum 'Red Sunset'" and another "Red Sunset Maple", your availability has two rows that should be one. It is worth half an hour in winter to settle a house style for names and sizes and have everyone use it.
The fourth is who is allowed to see which price. Wholesale pricing is set per customer or per tier, and commercially sensitive in a way retail prices are not. Growers who get it wrong find out when a buyer quotes another buyer's number back at them.
What to leave out
Plenty is worth knowing without being worth a field you have to maintain. Full production history is one, if nobody reads it. So is detailed labour tracking unless you cost jobs with it and act on the result, and so is anything your accountant already holds. Be wary of anything a crew member would have to type into a phone between two other tasks. They could, but in April they will not, and a field filled in sometimes is worse than one never filled in. The same rule holds for a two-person yard and a nursery with forty staff, and the larger one has more people to fill in fields badly.
Why the records come before the software
Every tool you might buy, from a planning system to a robot, an online shop or an ERP, reads from those four records, and automation applied to a wrong count produces wrong answers faster and with more confidence. So get the four right first, by hand if you must, then automate the keeping of them, and only then buy the things that read from them.
Sprout is built around keeping those four and little else. Every lot sits in a dated ready window, so what is ready now is kept apart from what will be ready in spring. Plants on an open order are committed and every screen shows what is still free. If you add a plant by voice that you already sell, the Walk tells you so and asks whether you meant that one, which keeps one row per plant and size. Each buyer sees only the prices for their own level, and Private lines only once you have approved them. A small yard gets the four without a spreadsheet, and a larger one gets them kept the same way by everyone who counts or sells.