The farm that ran on phone calls runs on software now.

The problem — The phone was the front desk, the order form, and the filing cabinet. Every booking was a call. Cut sheets — how each customer wants each animal processed — were emailed as paper forms or taken down verbally, preference by preference, and noted by hand. Pricing lived in someone's head. During peak season, answering the phone was a full-time job that produced zero pounds of processed meat.

What we did — An online booking system built around the cut sheet: farmers book their own slot, add each animal, and pick exactly how they want it processed — beef broken down primal by primal (chuck as roast or steak, pack sizes for ground, sausage flavors), with separate sheets for lamb, goat, and poultry. The farm's entire rate card is encoded in the system, so the price and the estimate compute themselves as the cut sheet fills in. Nothing gets re-asked at drop-off, and nothing depends on whoever answered the phone that day.

The problem — Processing capacity is the whole business — there are only so many slots in a week. People would book one, then never show up. That slot was gone: it could have gone to a paying customer, and instead it produced nothing.

What we did — A deposit gate, integrated with Square: a booking slot is only reserved once the deposit is paid, and the amount is calculated automatically from what's in the booking — per animal, per species, straight from the cart rules. No deposit, no slot. Under the hood the card is authorized first and captured only after the booking lands, with an hourly reconciliation job that flags any charge that ever ends up without a booking. The owner controls capacity directly too — blocking days and setting per-day caps (500 chickens on a Wednesday, 1,200 on a Friday) from an admin calendar, so the system stops overbooking before it happens.

The problem — Once an animal was dropped off, the only way for a customer to know its status was to call — and someone at the farm had to stop working, find out, and call back. Multiply by every active order, every week.

What we did — A kanban board for the processing floor — Dropped Off → Processing → Ready for Pickup → Picked Up. Staff move each order through the stages as they work, and the board is not just internal tracking: every stage move automatically texts the customer, and the one that matters most — “your order is ready for pickup” — arrives with their invoice and a one-tap sign-in link to their account. When customers do still call, an AI receptionist answers, looks up their live order status from the same data, and handles the routine questions.

The problem — Invoicing was manual — hours of it — and financial visibility was whatever could be reconstructed from paper, memory, and the bank statement. Customers had no way to see an invoice or change a booking without another phone call.

What we did — Automated invoicing generated straight from the cut-sheet data the system already holds — the same numbers the floor entered, priced by the same rate card, editable line by line when reality differs. Every invoice and order flows into one admin dashboard with a live revenue view the owners can actually plan against. And customers got a portal of their own: their invoices, their bookings, and the ability to reschedule a slot themselves.