Nothing we do happens at a desk. Will a system survive that?
Only if it is designed for the barn rather than the office, which means very few taps, large targets, offline capture and no assumption of signal. If a record cannot be made while someone is holding a syringe or a lead rope, it will be made later from memory or not at all. We build for the worst conditions the job actually has, not the best.
Can it work out a withdrawal period for us?
It can read the period off a photographed label and calculate a clear date, which removes the arithmetic and the looking-up. What it will not do is decide that an animal is clear to move. That confirmation is yours, every time, and the record shows you made it. The consequences of getting that wrong belong to a person, so the decision should too.
We are an auction business. Where does the time actually go?
Almost always in cataloguing and settlement. Photographs come back from a farm and somebody spends two evenings turning them into lots with descriptions. Then after the sale the settlement is done by hand. Drafting descriptions from the photographs for the auctioneer to correct, and generating settlements from the bidder record, is usually the whole project and it is not a large one.
Is a village of 811 people even a market for this?
The village is not; the radius is. Inside the sign there is a grade school, a fire department, a garage, an elevator and a post office, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But a vet here covers a large area, an auctioneer works several counties, and someone shipping from a shed sells to the whole country. Population inside the sign has very little to do with whether a business here has a problem worth fixing, and we would rather judge that on your actual workload.
How do you charge, and what stops the bill growing?
A fixed price against a written scope, produced after we map how you work now. That document says what will exist, what it costs, and the one number we expect to move. If you want more later it is quoted on its own and you can say no. There is no hourly meter running while you think about it.
Which parts are AI and which are not?
Reading a label, sorting an urgent call from a routine one, drafting a lot description from a photograph, recognising a common customer question — those are AI, and they are good uses of it. Routing, withdrawal arithmetic, settlement totals and stock levels are plain code, because they must be exactly right and repeatable. We will always tell you which is which rather than let the word cover everything.
Our client and animal records are sensitive. What are the guarantees?
They belong to your practice or your operation, they are never used to train anything, access is limited to people you name with reads and writes logged, and everything exports in an open format on request. We sign that before any money moves. In a farming community where the vet, the auctioneer and the buyer all know each other, careless record-keeping would end a business faster than a bad year.