Steve McGill

Van de Pallande, Oirschot

LEAF

Lightweight Easy Admin for Farmers

Business software for market gardens. Subscriptions, webshop, packing lists, invoices and direct debit in one system.

Built for Jess, who runs her whole week on it. Whether more market gardens follow is the next question.

Why LEAF exists

The market garden that did not fit the software

Most CSA market gardens charge for the whole season up front. That is no accident: one amount and a fixed list can still be managed by hand.

Jess does it differently. Her customers pay in arrears, can skip any week, and can add to an order. That puts organic vegetables within reach of a household that cannot front a whole season in March. But every exception she made, she absorbed herself.

The customer records lived across several spreadsheets, next to Mailchimp and the bookkeeping. Invoicing took days, and the mistakes ran both ways: someone who skipped a week sometimes got a bill anyway, and a forgotten addition produced none at all. Nobody ever notices the second kind.

active subscriptions
87
Friday pickup points
8
The printable packing list for one pickup point

A fresh list per pickup point, every Friday.

LEAF now produces those lists and invoices, in arrears, for what was actually delivered. It matches incoming payments to the right invoice itself. What took days is one action, and customers can be added without the flexibility giving way. Other market gardens trade that flexibility away to keep the admin manageable.

What it does

From order to payment

One system instead of a webshop, an accounting package and Mailchimp that know nothing about each other.

The customer list in the vendor portal, with the filter bar and dozens of customer rows.
Vendor portal: the customer list

Selling

  • Customer records with order history
  • Subscriptions customers change themselves
  • Webshop for one-off orders
  • Newsletter and email

Boxes

  • Week planning
  • Packing lists per pickup point
  • Delivery days and pickup points
  • Customer feedback

Payments

  • Invoices and credit notes
  • iDEAL/Wero and direct debit through Mollie
  • A bank feed that reconciles payments automatically
  • Invoicing and direct debit run on schedule, with nobody pressing a button
  • Every change stays traceable

Because it all sits in one system, the webshop knows the customer who also receives the newsletter. An email to a single pickup point is a filter rather than an export file, and anyone who logs in already sees their own pickup point and current order.

Access

Two portals

Jess runs the market garden. Customers manage their own subscription.

The subscription screen in the vendor portal

Vendor portal

Jess's daily work: orders, packing lists, invoices and the week plan.

The orders overview in the customer portal

Customer portal

Skip a week, add to an order, change details and pay invoices.

On the roadmap

What is coming

In the order they come up.

  1. More than one market garden

    Every garden on LEAF with its own customers and its own figures.

  2. Supplier network

    A shared catalogue, so gardens order from each other instead of by email.

  3. Planting plan driven by demand

    Planting what customers actually ordered before, rather than an estimate.

  4. AI assistant

    Requests arriving by email and WhatsApp, turned into an action you only have to confirm. For someone who is out in the field all day and does not reach a screen until the evening.

Screenshots

A look inside

The data in these screenshots is not real. Names, addresses and payment details have been replaced.

The customer list in the vendor portal, with the filter bar and dozens of customer rows.
Vendor portal: the customer list
The subscription screen in the vendor portal, with lines, box sizes and the orders it generated.
One customer's subscription
The orders overview in the customer portal, where a customer skips a week.
A customer skips a week
The printable packing list for one pickup point, with each customer's box size and contents.
The printable packing list
The webshop with this week's selection and a button to add something to the box.
The webshop for one-off orders
The week plan, where the contents of each box size are put together for that week.
The week plan: what goes in the box
The product catalogue with hundreds of products, units and prices.
The product catalogue
The list of pickup points, with the delivery time and number of subscribers for each.
The eight pickup points
One customer's invoice list, with the status and payment date of each invoice.
One customer's invoices, with payment status
The scheduled jobs that create invoices, collect direct debits and read the bank.
What runs by itself
The customer portal, where a customer adds something that applies to that week only.
Adding to one week only
The feedback overview, with customers' thumbs up and down for each week.
Feedback by week
Incoming bank transactions matched to an invoice automatically.
Payments that match themselves to an invoice
An invoice as the customer receives it, with the product, VAT and payment status per line.
The invoice as the customer gets it
A pricing rule that automatically discounts customers who host a pickup point.
A discount for lending your yard as a pickup point
The customer portal with upcoming deliveries, and a button per week to change or skip.
The customer manages their own weeks
One customer's orders, with the uninvoiced lines and a button to invoice them together.
From delivered weeks to one invoice
A subscription showing the pickup point for each week and the orders it produces.
A subscription, week by week
A sent garden bulletin with the number of recipients and how many opened and clicked.
The garden bulletin, and who opened it
The audit log, showing what changed, by whom and when, for every action.
Every change stays traceable
An invoice in the customer portal, summarising the five delivered weeks it covers.
Five delivered weeks, one invoice

Comparison

Why off-the-shelf webshop software does not fit

Subscription software assumes a fixed amount on a fixed day. That is precisely what a market garden does not have.

The amount depends on the harvest and on what was added, and the customer can still cancel up to Thursday. WooCommerce shows the clash most clearly: a renewal there is built from whatever lines are on the subscription at that moment, so an addition meant for one week quietly becomes a permanent one, and skipping a single Friday means pausing or moving the schedule. Anyone who wants it to work differently builds that part themselves.

The customer portal, where a customer adds something that applies to that week only.
In LEAF: an addition that applies to this week only

Then there is the payment side. Shopify Payments and Wix Payments offer no Dutch direct debit, so you connect Mollie, and on Shopify that costs 0.6 to 2% per transaction depending on your plan. In LEAF the first payment goes through iDEAL/Wero, then a mandate, and after that the direct debit runs on its own. Mollie charges €0.32 per iDEAL/Wero payment and €0.35 per direct debit, with no percentage of turnover.

And that still only covers the selling side. Pickup points, packing lists, week planning and a bank statement that matches itself to your invoices are in none of them.