Whether you’re running a large multi-farm hub or just beginning to sell online for your farm, you know time management is crucial for a successful business. “Time stealers” not only affect your bottom line, they can also prevent your business from growing and even flourishing. Time stealers are necessary but repetitive tasks that *should* be automated but are instead taking up your valuable time that could be used to grow the business instead. Just like farm equipment is meant to reduce the time it takes to plant, weed, and harvest, LFM’s software platform is designed to streamline and eliminate your admin tasks so you can concentrate on growing your business and expanding opportunities. Here are 5 different ways LFM can help you recapture time.

Customer Communication

Pickup & delivery reminders, invoices, and payment reminders can all be automated or streamlined – saving hours every week. LFM even has an easy way to bulk message customers for last minute issues like delivery delay, pickup location issues, etc.

Order Changes

Items being out of stock, sudden crop failures, cooler issues – these things happen all too often and can take a long time to deal with – unless you’ve got a good system for it. LFM makes it easy to update orders in bulk rather than clicking into hundreds of orders the next time a storm causes problems.

Producer Communication and Updating Availability

If you manage a market with multiple producers, it can be hard to make sure everyone is on the same page and up to speed. Use LFM’s bulk communication to message all of your producers in one place. Instead of spending hours each week summarizing what each producer needs to bring for the week’s orders, you can even schedule their final order totals to be automatically sent right after ordering closes, even if ordering closes in the middle of the night. Similarly, use LFM’s flexible tools to auto-list availability based on each producer – whether they have a constantly replenished supply like a dairy or bakery or variable supply like a typical grower.

Harvest and Pack

As soon as you have an order you should not have to be re-entering data for any purpose. Whether that’s packing an order, invoicing a customer, printing out a label – anything that relies on order data should be automated. Many farms we talk to do this paperwork at night to prep for the next day and it is not scalable – LFM can automate this and offers a scalable solution that is only limited by how much you can grow and produce instead of admin constraints.

Certifications and Planning

Many farms dread the reporting for certifications and putting their production plan together. In a few clicks, you can learn how much Certified Organic Rainbow Chard was sold in 2020, what lots you sold and to whom, and your top buyers of the Rainbow chard or across all sales.

Maximizing your data from online orders is the main tool for fighting time waste. Any time lost adds up bit by bit, so developing a sales and distribution system with in-depth automation can be invaluable. Even better, solving these time stealing issues can help your farm or hub double, triple and even quadruple sales. LFM provides the necessary tools to eliminate manual redundancies and efficiently scale up your business for success.