As the orchard grew over the years, so too did the paperwork and complexity of the operation. We have leased orchards, joint ventures, and our own personal blocks, each requiring different codes for the payroll.

For example, we had four, and at one point five, different orchard locations. During the harvest season, staff would be shared between gangs, which caused some real headaches when it came to payroll and record keeping. Manually collating all the information and making sure it was all correct, took up a lot of time!

With the Hectre App, everything is recorded and checked throughout the day. You know what is going into the bins, who has picked what, and how many bins they have done.

Then, at the end of the pay period, all the information is in Hectre, and you can trust that it's correct.

The time savings are undeniable. With Hectre, payroll takes about a fifth of the time that it took before. I used to have to be involved because, as a harvest manager, I knew the five different orchard locations, who was in the gangs, and who was supervising them.

So that required three days of my time in the office to correlate and code all the information. Now that it is checked and recorded with Hectre, I don't have to do any of that!

Before Hectre, there could be quite a few mistakes that weren’t picked up on, which meant having to go back through the manual records to find and correct them. Not having to do that anymore saves a lot of time too.

Entering and checking the data daily with the Hectre app also helps keep the number of mistakes to a minimum. It’s far more accurate than when we had a manual system. And if there is a problem, it’s a lot easier to go back and pick it up in the app.

There’s a lot of time-saving within the administration side of the business, that’s for sure.

In the past, we used truck dockets to keep track of what had been picked.

If a truck docket or the truck book got lost, then you’d have to guess how much fruit came off that block, or go back to our picking records to work out how much fruit was picked from a block.

Whereas now, it’s all in Hectre, so it’s really easy to find the variety, block, or area it came from, and how much was picked.

As with learning anything new, there were some teething problems in the beginning, but overall, it was relatively easy to set up and start using.

The main issue was convincing some of the older staff members to use it. We had one person that said he’d never use the Hectre App; “There’s no way you’re getting me on one of those things!”

Two weeks later, he was busy telling everyone else how to do it!

The support from Hectre is really good, and so are the people. There’s always somebody on the end of the phone to help out.

They also visit regularly to make sure we’re up to where we should be, and they listen if we want to discuss any changes or share feedback with them.

We would absolutely recommend Hectre to other growers.

It’s easy to clock your team in and assign blocks, and easier at the end of the day to add in how many trees they’ve done and send it all to the office. It’s quick and easy to do this daily, which means I don’t have to worry about handling it all at the end of the week.

There were a couple of teething problems in the beginning, but now I know my way around it like the back of my hand. And if there is an issue that we can't solve, Hectre’s customer success rep sorts it out for us.

When I’ve made a suggestion about how to improve it for us, it’s been passed on to Hectre, and usually implemented. You can’t ask for more than that.

Paperwork that used to take about 30 minutes every night, now takes about ten minutes in total. It’s awesome to have that extra free time after work.

Having a record of everything on the Hectre app also makes my job a lot easier. Things like being able to view a weekly summary or check where we were on such and such date, what job we were doing and how long it took, it’s all great information to have at your fingertips.

I also think we’re more productive with Hectre, especially during the harvest, because of how easy it is to print and manage the bin cards. We don’t need to write out each picker's name and the block they are in. All you need to do is click on a name, and it prints it out. That’s it!