ABCgrower is revolutionising life on farm for busy horticulturists.

Offering an alternative away from pen and paper, ABCgrower is a flexible, digital on-farm labour and inventory management software tool.

And with the offer of full training at no charge to ensure a successful journey, there is no reason why you shouldn’t give ABCgrower a go.

Built with input and feedback form growers, the software seemingly small functionality can lead to great gains especially when it comes to recording partially filled bins at the end of each day.

A part bin contributes to a picker’s daily productivity and pay calculations and without it, a top up payment to meet minimum wage may be needed resulting in unnecessary cost.

This year Fruitico switched from signing off their workers by selecting their names from a list, to scanning cards held by the workers, which means they must be physically present at the end of the day.

Farm Manager Kevin DellÁgostino says this single minor change has massively improved absenteeism.

“Systems like that put more accountability back to the individual worker which has helped us a lot,” Mr DellÁgostino said.

The visibility ABCgrower offers with respect to worker pay, minimum wage top-up liability for piece workers and overtime liability for waged workers means there’s no surprises.

Mai Fruervang used ABCgrower at Danfrugt, Denmark and now advises other growers on the benefits experienced and how they exceed the cost of administration.

The breadth of functionality and flexibility ABCgrower offers means growers do need to make a time commitment to get the most out of the system.

Operations manager at Bearsley Farms Robyn Brady said implementing ABCgrower is quite a learning curve and because it is a new way of doing things and a whole complete change of process.

A sentiment echoed by ABC Software Founder Sharon Chapman.

Speaking at Hort Connections earlier this year, Ms Chapman said you do need to spend some time on the program to ultimately save time.

A recent Global Coalition of Fresh Produce’s Survey into global production and operation costs for prices for fruit and vegetables supports the anecdotes of input cost rising by at least 30 per cent and productivity decreasing by a similar amount.

While there is a cost to labour management software this can be recovered many times over by improvements in efficiency from using the information the software provides.

Ms Fruervang says the benefits include increase in picker performance, transparency and higher motivation for workers, just to mention a few.

ABC have clients reporting cost savings of 30 percent and recently a berry grower halved their harvest cost on one farm.

What all these clients have in common is utilising the comprehensive reporting to enable them to keep on top of productivity and taking action where required.