How growers lose money
Losses are real-time. Reporting is seasonal. Nothing can be fixed in between.
A nursery knows its shrinkage at the end of the season, as one number. That number is accurate and useless: it cannot be traced to a bench, a batch, a week or a decision.
The losses themselves happened continuously — a propagation failure in week three, an irrigation fault in week nine, a grading standard drifting in week fourteen. Each was visible to somebody at the time.
Recording a loss reason at the moment of the loss costs a few seconds and changes what the season-end number means. It becomes a list of causes ranked by cost rather than a single figure to absorb.
For one client, the top two coded reasons accounted for more than half of annual loss, and both were fixable within a season. Neither had ever appeared in a report before, because no report had a field for them.