Requirements checklist
What to ask for when choosing software for flour mills.
A checklist built from how flour mills work, to print or save as a PDF and bring to any supplier meeting.
What the software should cover
Tick each one that matters to your business.
- Wheat intake and testing
- Blend recipes and bin stock
- Cleaning, tempering and milling runs
- Flour grades and specification tests
- Bagging and bulk loading
- Bran and pollard sales
Roles that need their own access
Who logs in, and what each person may see or change.
- For head millers
- For wheat intake staff
- For laboratory testers
- For dispatch and bagging
- For sales and owners
Reports to ask for
Ask to see each one with your own sample data.
- Extraction rate by wheat lot, grade and month
- Wheat stock by bin and type
- Flour batches with test results against customer limits
- Bran and pollard sales by buyer
- Bag and bulk dispatch by customer
- Customer balances, oldest first
Systems it may need to connect to
Note which ones you already run.
- Weighbridge scale import
- Barcode and label printing
- Accounting export
Questions for any vendor
Put these to every supplier you are comparing.
- Can a blend recipe be kept for each flour grade?
- How is extraction worked out?
- Can the lab store a customer’s protein and ash limits?
- Can it handle bulk tanker loads?
- Will it show how much wheat is left in a bin?
- Can machine downtime be kept?
- Can customers see their orders?
- What happens to our data if we stop?
- How is the quotation prepared?
Where the work usually breaks today
Circle the ones you recognise. They set the order of the project.
- The wheat blend is not written down
- Extraction is calculated once a month
- Flour specifications live in emails
- Bag and bulk dispatches are not reconciled
- By-product income is unconnected
Prefer to talk it through? See the flour mills page.