Document your orders
Map out your points of contacts for sales, delivery logistics, customer service, accounts receivable and accounts payable. Depending on how these duties are distributed among your staff, how do you make sure everyone is checking in?
Even if you use online tools to manage your sales, there will be a need to record and share how the physical food travels from farm through your operations and out to customers. Make sure you have thorough notes for when you need to refer back to situations that happened a month ago, or even an unexpected change that happened earlier in the day.
Here are some of the basic pieces of paperwork related to an order:
- Price List – what farmers have available to sell
- Pick List – tells farmer what to harvest based on their orders
- Packing Slip – tells customers what is in a delivery
- Customer Invoice – total customer owes based on their order
- Farmer Receipt – total of what is owed the farmer based on their orders
What other paperwork will you need? If you keep inventory, consider how an Inventory tracking document might help.
Since these documents can quickly add up as you grow and leave you prone to error if you’re filling them out manually, you’ll want to streamline their generation. Tools like Local Orbit automatically generate this paperwork as part of the online food ordering process.