Animal feed software that prices the bag against today's materials

Your formulation has a price, and it moves weekly

A feed mill sells a fixed thing at a fixed price: a bag of layer mash, priced to sit beside whatever the mill down the road is charging. What is inside the bag is not fixed at all. Maize bran follows the harvest, silverfish follows the lake and the weather, cotton and sunflower cake follow the presses. They move independently, and none of them ask what you are charging.

So the bag that kept 16,000 shillings in March can keep 6,000 in August without a single thing changing on your price list. Nothing feels different. The mill runs, the lorry leaves, the farms keep coming. It is only when the month closes short that anybody goes looking, and by then it is four hundred bags too late.

PesaScope records what each material cost you and what each bag sold for. Set against the quantities in your formulation, that is enough to say which feed still earns its place on the price list and which one you are now milling as a favour to your customers.

How a mill runs it

1. Buy materials in the unit you actually buy themA lorry of maize bran, a tonne of cotton cake, sacks of mukene. Record the purchase with the conversion set, so the store counts kilos even when the invoice is in tonnes.
2. Let the cost blend across deliveriesA cheap load and an expensive one blend into a weighted-average cost, which is what a margin should be measured against rather than whatever you happened to pay last.
3. Keep one product line per feed and per sizeLayer mash 70kg, broiler starter 50kg, pig grower. A mill running one line called feed can never see which formulation is carrying the others.
4. Sell to farms cash or on accountPoultry farms pay when the birds sell. A credit sale puts the balance under that farm's name, and the aging shows how long it has stood there.

What a feed mill sells

Pick "Animal feed mill" at sign-up and this list is already there, and the sizes matter as much as the names do.

Maize bran is on the list because mills sell it as well as mix it. Custom milling — a farmer bringing his own maize and paying a fee — is set up as a service, so it never gets counted as a bag sale.

One batch of layer mash — 100 bags

Silverfish is a tenth of the weight and just over a quarter of the material cost. When mukene goes from 3,500 to 5,000 in a dry month, this batch costs UGX 1,050,000 more — 10,500 a bag — and two-thirds of what the batch was keeping disappears, while the bag price stays exactly where it was.

A recipe, not a ration formulator

PesaScope has an optional production module, and for a mill it is the natural fit. A recipe holds the materials in a batch with their quantities and live costs, plus labour, power and packaging, and works out cost per bag and margin as you type. Record a run and the materials leave the store while the finished bags enter stock. It is off by default — a mill can run a full year on purchases and sales alone.

What it is not is a ration formulator. It knows nothing about crude protein, metabolisable energy, lysine or calcium. It will not balance a diet, tell you a substitution is nutritionally wrong, or solve for a least-cost mix. It costs the formulation you hand it, exactly as you wrote it. Nothing here replaces a nutritionist or a laboratory result.

There are no compliance records either — no certification files, no printed batch labels, and no recall function beyond the material movement history the store keeps. If a customer's flock goes off feed and you need to know which batch went where, you will be reading sales by date, not pressing a button.

Where a mill leaks money

1. Pricing off a formulation you costed onceThe bag price was worked out properly, in a month when every material happened to cost what it cost. None of them cost that now.
2. Watching the wrong materialBran is bulky, visible and moves a little. Mukene is a tenth of the mix and moves a lot. Price off the bran and you lose whole months to the fish.
3. Bags going out on trustFarms pay after the birds sell, which is fine until three of them are sixty days behind and you are borrowing to buy bran.
4. Sweepings, spillage and generous bagsA bag filled to 72 kg instead of 70 gives away nearly three percent of every batch, and it leaves the mill looking exactly like a sale.

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Questions feed millers ask