Where Phase features come from: growers asking for them
Most of what we build into Phase starts as a message from someone on a farm. Four recent features, and the plain requests they came from.
People sometimes ask how we decide what to build next. The honest answer is that we mostly do not decide. Growers and their staff tell us, usually in one sentence, and usually because something annoyed them that morning.
Here are four recent ones.
Not to track time, just for safety
A farm's staff asked for a way to clock on and off. They were clear about what it was for. Not to track anyone's time. Just to show when someone had left the farm, so that somebody would notice if they had not come back.
That became signing on and off. The request shaped the whole thing: it is opt-in, it never follows anyone while they work, and the one thing it does well is tell the right person when someone is overdue.
Nowhere to put the pump reading
A grower logging fuel pointed out that there was nowhere to enter the reading on the bowser, yet the finished entry complained that it had no meter reading.
They were right, and fixing it properly turned out to be worth far more than the fix. Once Phase had the pump reading on every fill-up, it could compare what the pump moved with what was written down, and show the fuel that was never recorded. That is now the fuel log.
Opening every product to change a price
Several growers told us the same thing. When prices moved, they were opening each product, or each job on each paddock, one at a time.
Nobody had asked for a spreadsheet. But a spreadsheet was what they were describing, so that is what we built: one grid for every price, where you can paste a whole price list and push it onto the plans in one step.
A calendar of who worked when
A grower with seasonal workers wanted a timetable where staff put in their own start and finish times, a calendar to look back over, and a note of what each person did that day.
That is Hours, almost exactly as described.
Why we work this way
We farm too, so we have plenty of our own opinions. But one farm is one farm. A feedlot, a mixed farm in the east and a cropping program in the west do the same job in different ways, and the only way to build something that fits all three is to listen to all three.
It also keeps us from building things nobody wants. A feature that starts from a real complaint has at least one person waiting to use it.
So if something in Phase is slower than it should be, or missing, tell us. Write to support@phase.ag. Requests like these are where the next features come from.
