A compliance and recording platform for a multi-farm dairy group

The group ran eleven dairy platforms under one ownership structure, each keeping its own records in its own way. Effluent applications were written on a whiteboard and transcribed later. Animal health treatments lived in a book in the shed. When the regional council scheduled an audit, someone spent two weeks assembling evidence that already existed but could not be found.

We built the recording layer first and the reporting layer second, which is the opposite of how these projects usually go. Staff record at the point the work happens, on a phone, with no expectation of coverage — the app queues everything locally and reconciles when it next sees a signal. The data model was designed around what an auditor asks for, so the compliance pack is a query rather than a project.

The unglamorous win was the conflict handling. Two staff recording against the same paddock on the same morning used to mean one entry silently overwrote the other. Now both are kept, flagged and resolved by a manager, which took a fortnight to build and removed the reason nobody trusted the old system.