An Aruma business
Version two, rewritten after your detail of 25 August. The scope grew, so the price moved. Every line of that movement is itemised, and the covering email explains it.
Summary
Your follow up added grower self service, reminders, a run sheet and no-show tracking, and your note of this afternoon added the full grower portal. All of that is in the core price below. The waitlist and SMS are priced separately.
254 hours, about 13 weeks. Your brief and your follow up, now including the full grower portal you asked for. Fixed price, GST included.
268 hours. The core plus SMS reminders, which adds a second reminder channel without changing the booking workflow.
Starting 7 September, the core is live in the first week of December. Three months before the March season.
Unchanged from the first proposal, whichever options you take. Only SMS adds anything, and that is billed at cost.
Your objective, point by point
You closed your email with a list. Here is each one against what this build delivers, so there is no ambiguity about whether the objective is met.
Every field from your spreadsheet, sort type included, either from the public form or from inside their own portal.
From their portal, or straight from the link in their confirmation email. Capacity is released the moment they cancel, and the office sees who cancelled and when.
One daily tonnage cap, exactly as your brief describes, with the tonnage worked out from the average weights you set for each delivery type.
Hilmac, Richmond or any other company you add, emailed the moment a booking confirms, with every field they need.
In the core price. SMS reminders are priced separately because they carry an ongoing per message cost.
Capacity at a glance, the day list, week and month calendars, and a printable run sheet where each load is marked arrived, no show or cancelled.
Per grower, with dates and totals, exactly as you described. This is the reason each grower gets a record rather than being a name typed into a form.
Where you are now
A grower rings or emails the office. An administrator writes the booking down and keys it into an Excel spreadsheet. That spreadsheet is what holds the daily intake capacity together.
It carries sort type, grower, farm, processor, transport provider, delivery type and size, quantity, the weight for the booking and the total allocated for the day. When someone cancels, the office is called, the row is edited and the capacity is worked out again by hand.
By your own description, that spreadsheet is what the whole intake runs on. Everything in this proposal exists to take that job off it, without losing a single column.
In shell, on the belt
How it works
No one at Summerland approves anything. The grower fills the form and the system answers immediately.
The grower never types a tonnage. They pick a delivery type, a sort type and a day, and the conversion happens using the average weights you set.
Scope, the grower side
You have asked for the full grower portal, so that is what is priced. Growers get a real account with a proper way in, and they still never have to choose a password.
Sort type, grower, farm, mobile, email, processor, transport company, delivery type and size, quantity, date and notes. The field list comes from the columns you sent me, so it matches what the office already records rather than what I imagined.
Confirmed, or declined with the next days that have room. If two growers go for the same last slot at the same moment, only one gets it. That is handled in the database, not by hoping.
Change a date or a quantity, or cancel outright, from the portal or straight from the link in their confirmation email. A cancellation releases the tonnage immediately and a day that was full becomes bookable again with nobody in the office touching it, and the office sees who cancelled and when.
A home screen showing what is booked and what has already been delivered, their farm and contact details saved so the next booking fills itself in, and a season series they can set up or change themselves. They get in by asking for a link, so there is no password to choose, forget or reset.
Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from March to September, created in one go. If some dates in that series are already full, the series is not rejected. The grower sees a short list of just the dates that clashed, each with the nearest days that do have room, and picks. Everything else in the series saves as normal.
An email with the grower, farm, date, processor, transport provider, delivery type and quantity. SMS as well if you take that option.
Scope, the office side
Reporting is broken out because your brief was specific about it, and because splitting volume by sort type is what makes the numbers useful rather than just tidy.
Daily, booked and remaining capacity. The day list showing grower, farm, processor, transport, sort type, delivery type, quantity, calculated tonnage and date. Week and month calendars marking which days are full.
Printable, listing every load booked for that day, each marked arrived, no show or cancelled exactly as you described. If you also refuse loads on arrival, a rejected status is a small addition and I have priced it with the other open items.
Per grower, with dates and totals, exactly as you described. John Smith, 24 bookings, 2 no-shows. Visible on the dashboard and in the reports.
By grower, farm, processor and transport company, and by sort type so FS, DH and CON are separated rather than lumped together. Seasonal summaries, capacity utilisation, and every report exports to Excel.
Daily capacity, average weights per delivery type, transport companies, processors, sort types, notification addresses and staff logins. Changing any of it does not need me.
Cost
The first proposal was $21,500 for your original brief. Your follow up added grower self service, reminders, a run sheet and no-show tracking, and the full portal you asked for this afternoon carries its own security and privacy work with it. That is 118 hours on top of your original brief, and it is the whole reason the core is now $40,150. Every line has its hours, so nothing is hidden in a round number.
Everything needed to retire the spreadsheet and control capacity correctly. Every line carries its own price, so you can take any of them out.
Take the core and the SMS reminders, and leave the waitlist for version two. Growers already get an email reminder in the core. SMS adds a second channel that does not depend on anyone opening an email. Whether that is worth $2,200 to you depends on how your growers actually behave, which you know and I do not. That is $42,350 including GST.
It is the dearest of the two options and the least proven. It only earns its money if your days fill often enough that growers are regularly turned away, and you will know that better than I do. One season of real bookings will tell you that for certain, and adding it later costs the same as adding it now.
Both came from your follow up. Take either, both or neither.
Questions, not scope. Nothing here is in the core price and none of it is assumed.
Anything not in the core can be added now or added later, at the prices shown above. Later costs the same as now, so there is no penalty for waiting until a season of real bookings tells you whether you actually need it.
40% deposit on signing, which books the start date. 30% when the booking engine works, 30% when it goes live.
The code and the data are yours. You get the accounts and the keys at handover.
30 days of fixes at no charge. After that the monthly plan covers defects, security updates and minor changes inside its hours. New features and integrations are quoted separately.
All of it in house. Nothing is sent offshore or subcontracted.
Timeline
Starting Monday 7 September, the core is live in the first week of December. Both options on top make it 15 weeks. Either way it is finished, tested and quiet before the March season starts.
These are outside dates, not hoped-for ones. The chart shows the core. The single thing that makes it faster is answering the four open questions early, because most delay on a build like this is waiting, not working.
Running costs
The system got bigger. The running cost did not, because it is the same hosting, the same backups and the same monitoring. A 12 month term, and the three hours are yours to spend on whatever you want changed.
Unused change hours roll into the following month, once.
That is the only thing that adds a running cost, roughly six to eight cents a message plus a small monthly fee for the number. What that comes to depends entirely on how many bookings you take, so I bill it at cost rather than guess at a figure and build it into the monthly.
I can drop to $350 a month for hosting, backups and security only, and bill changes at $100 an hour with a three hour minimum. Cheaper each month, more expensive the first time you want something changed mid harvest.
Before I can start
Between your brief and your follow ups you have answered nearly everything I asked, including the ones I thought would be hardest. These four are all that is left. Two of them are confirmations that cost nothing. Two could add a little work, and I have said which and roughly what, so there are no surprises either way.
Your brief says growers will not enter a tonnage and the system will use averages, and that is what is priced. Your published terms currently ask growers to estimate. I have assumed the averages are the deliberate change, since that is the point of the new system.
Transport companies are emailed on every confirmed booking. Marquis and Green Farms are captured but not notified. If you want them emailed too that is a second notification flow, about 4 hours, and I would add it to the quote rather than pretend it is free.
A line goes down and the day falls from 80 tonnes to 50, but 65 are booked. Nothing gets cancelled silently. If you want the system to flag the day and hand you the over-booked list to sort out, that is about 6 hours on top. If you would rather just handle it by phone, it costs nothing. Tell me which.
As priced, the system does not restrict delivery times at all. A grower picks a date, not a time, so after hours arrangements carry on by phone exactly as they do now. If you want the system to enforce your delivery hours and refuse weekends, that sits in the operating rules item above rather than in the core.
How I work
Josh Seage. Not an account manager, not a ticket queue. I write the software and I answer the phone, and you are never handed to someone else who has to go and ask.
All of it is built and managed in house, with no offshore team and nothing subcontracted. What I quote is what I build.
I am in Wollongbar, under ten minutes from Wardell Road. Site visits, training and anything that needs a person standing in the shed all happen in person.
The work would start Monday 7 September and this is currently held for you. If that date matters, tell me and I will hold it firmly while you decide.
Next steps
A reply to my email is enough. Short answers are fine, and if one of them is not your call to make, say so and I will work around it. If you would rather talk any of it through, I am on 0403 820 584, but there is no need.
A short written document reflecting your four answers and whichever options you want. If any of them change the scope, the new price is in front of you before you sign anything, not after.
That is what holds 7 September. The site visit is the first thing I do once the work is underway, not something I ask of you beforehand.
Walking your intake properly, writing it up and turning it into a specification is real work, and it is already paid for inside the fixed price as stage one. Doing it before you have committed would mean either rushing it or asking you to buy a separate discovery phase first. I would rather keep it as one price and one decision.
That the four answers do not change the shape of the job. If one of them does, I requote before you sign rather than raising a variation later. Nothing here obliges you to anything until you sign.