The busy weeks are the only weeks that matter. When would you build?
Between them. December through February for anything touching harvest, and late summer for anything touching spring application. We will not deploy into a working season, and if you ask us to we will explain why the answer is no. A half-trained system during harvest costs more than the problem it was meant to fix.
Growers here have been doing business on a handshake for decades. Will they use this?
They will use the parts that save them a phone call — checking a contract position, seeing the wait at the pit, getting a settlement quickly. They will not use anything that makes them create an account to ask a question. We design for that, and the handshake stays exactly where it is.
How careful do you have to be with application records?
Very. Product, rate, date, wind, applicator licence — that is a regulatory record, and it needs to be captured at the time and signed by the licensed person. The system’s job is to make that easy in a cab with dirty hands, and to make the record impossible to lose. It is not to decide what to spray.
What is your position on replacing our grain accounting package?
Usually against it. Those packages handle a genuinely complicated domain and have decades of edge cases in them. The gap is nearly always at the edges — capture at the scale, communication with growers, settlements out faster. That is where we build, alongside what you already run.
Do we get our data if we leave?
Yes, all of it, in an open format, whenever you ask. Tickets, contracts, application records, matter files. We write the export commitment into the agreement up front. For a business whose records may be needed years later in a regulatory or legal context, that is not a courtesy, it is a requirement.
A town of 1,600 — do you have clients this size?
The town size is not the number that matters. An elevator on East Sixth Street can move a great deal of grain, and a two-office law practice on Locust Street can carry hundreds of matters. We look at transaction volume and at what a mistake costs you. Plenty of small-town businesses have both in quantity.
Is any of this actually artificial intelligence?
The reading part is — pulling figures off a scale ticket, sorting an inbox of scanned deeds into the right matter, spotting that a seed order is ten times the acreage on file. The scheduling and the accounting are ordinary software, because ordinary software is more predictable and costs less to run. We use whichever is correct and we tell you which is which.
Who are we dealing with day to day?
A small US-based team, the same people through the project, working across Central Illinois and Central Indiana. No handoff to an account manager after the sale and no offshore development on your files. We work under NDA whenever you want one in place.