How Goedheid Got Eight Working Days Back a Month

Nothing changed for Goedheid’s customers. The same Fillout order form they already knew kept working exactly as before, feeding the same Google Sheet, which mattered, because it already worked. What changed is what happens after an order lands. Together we built a master sheet that reads the orders and runs the whole month from there, shaped around how Mariëtte actually works rather than how a system thinks she should. It all lives in Google Workspace, in the Sheets, Gmail and Drive she already uses, and the automation behind it is Google Apps Script, which we wrote with the help of Claude Code, an AI coding tool. That combination is a big part of why a system this custom was possible for a business this size: no new software to buy, and no new logins to remember.

The orders sort themselves. One customer’s order includes products from many farmers, and each farmer needs their own list. That flip used to be the three-quarter-day Excel job. It now happens in one step, split by farm day. The farmers noticed straight away. Their feedback, in her words, was that it is “a user-friendly document”, with their totals at the top and the customer detail below for those who want it.

The emails write themselves. One click drafts every farmer’s schedule into an email with its reports attached, and another does the same for every customer’s invoice. Her word for what lands in the drafts folder is “beautiful”: a friendly message, the right attachments, and an easy-to-find invoice number. Nothing sends on its own. Mariëtte reads each one, tweaks a line where she wants to, and presses send. That alone replaced what had been a day of drafting, message by message.

Nobody gets billed for something that is not coming. When a product with limited stock runs out, later orders go on a list of people to phone instead of being added to an invoice. Mariëtte sees what is close to selling out and can close it off on the form before anyone is disappointed at the collection table.

The sheet checks its own work. Blank submissions and accidental double orders get flagged before anything goes out, what Mariëtte calls “red lights or alerts before you start with the export to the farmers and before you start with the invoices”. A final check compares every invoice back to what was ordered.

What the Days Bought

When we asked what she does with the time, her first answer was a joke. “I’ve got all this time, I don’t know what to do, because it’s just too easy. I will go and have some coffee.”

The real answers came out over the rest of the conversation. The margin on every product is now visible at the press of a button, and within one cycle of seeing it, Mariëtte had repriced several products that were earning less than she thought. ( Read: Why Cash Is the Best Test of Your Management Reporting Quality ) The same report caught a farmer’s invoice that had overcharged her, in an hour instead of the old full day of checking. And because Goedheid earns a commission on what it facilitates, that report doubles as the document her auditor needs, ready as is.

Then there is the cost of the work itself. The system covers parts of several jobs Mariëtte would otherwise have to pay for: capturing a hundred invoices, conducting stock checks, and gathering the data behind the sales and margin reports that an accountant would normally bill hours for. Her own summary is the best one. “It’s almost like having an admin assistant, but there’s no human error.” And, she added, no sick days. She once paid a considerable amount for two months of stand-in admin cover. Her estimate now is that a stand-in would need three to four hours a month and the ability to read the control panel, because the steps are written out in order and in plain language on the sheet itself.

The part she kept coming back to, though, was the farmers. Her biggest farmer saves around 75% of his own farm day admin, and the monthly errors on his invoices have stopped, because the weights he used to relay by hand now travel back and forth in an Excel sheet built for exactly that.

“It hasn’t just made my life easier, it has simplified the process for the farmers as well.” – MARIËTTE FERREIRA, GOEDHEID

For a business whose whole reason for existing is the farmers, that carried real weight. “It’s almost like we’ve given them something.”

How the Collaboration Worked

Two things made this work, and neither of them is technical.

The first was starting with the business, not the software. Before anything was built, we sat down and walked through the whole operation together, task by task. That is why the foundation has held. Not everything surfaced in those first conversations, and that turned out to be fine. Some needs only show themselves once real months run, the way the round trip for the meat farmers’ weights did, and the build was flexible enough to take them in as they came. She is firm about what made that possible: the first discussions have to cover everything they can, with the person who actually does the work in the room, and then the build has to be flexible enough to catch what those discussions missed.

The second was staying close after go-live. The system was tested in use, on real months rather than in a lab, and the time it was already saving is what made that possible: there was room to run something twice, compare, and fix the odd hiccup the same week. Trying is safe by design, because reports and checks never change the underlying numbers. The first month was hands-on, with questions answered the same day and the training session recorded so she could rewatch it, or hand it to an assistant one day. What mattered to her most was continuity, one person who knows her business, from the first meeting onward. She put the reason better than we could: “For most small business owners it’s their passion, it’s their baby.”

“I wasn’t feeling I’m all alone with this master sheet.”

ON THE FIRST MONTH AFTER GO-LIVE

One thing did not change, on purpose. Customers still mistype email addresses and occasionally submit an order twice, and no system catches everything. The checks are built to flag oddities rather than fix them on their own, and Mariëtte still scans through the new orders before each run because knowing her customers well enough to spot which typo belongs to which regular is not something a formula can do. What the system removed was the capture work. The judgement stayed hers.

What Mariëtte Would Tell Other Owners

Her advice to other small business owners weighing something like this is honest about the hurdle. A system feels like a big spend when you cannot yet see what it covers, and in her experience the need you can name is rarely the whole need. “If you don’t know what you’re missing, then you don’t know what you’re missing.” She thought the problem was invoicing. Stock limits, the farm day split, the packing schedule and the margin picture only revealed themselves once the work started.

Her second piece of advice is to know your own process before anyone builds anything. Mariëtte kept an Excel checklist of every task she ran in a month, worked through it with us step by step, and credits much of the result to it. Nobody else is inside your business, and the small thing you forget to mention is the one that becomes the big hiccup later.

Where It Goes From Here

Goedheid’s months now run to a rhythm that would have sounded like a joke a year ago: half an hour of farmer orders, an hour of invoices, an hour of checks, and the rest of the time back in the business.

And the system is still young. Each cycle, it files away its own history, and Mariëtte says she is looking forward to a few months from now, when there will be enough of it to show the trend per product: which lines to back, which to let go, which farmers are growing. That trend report is the next thing we are building together.