Straight Answers, Including the Hard Ones
What GrowerLive does, what it deliberately does not do, and what we put in writing. If your question is not here, ask us and we will answer it the same way.
Platform & Access
- Is GrowerLive really entirely web-based?
Yes. GrowerLive runs in a browser and nothing else. There is no software to install on a workstation, no client application to keep updated, and no server for you to buy, host, patch or back up.
That matters more than it sounds. A system that needs a server on site quietly hands you a list of jobs: someone owns the hardware, someone applies the updates, someone restores it if it fails, and anyone working away from the building needs a VPN or a remote desktop to reach it. None of that exists here. If a device has a browser and an internet connection, it has GrowerLive.
- Do we need a server, or IT staff, to run it?
No. GrowerLive is hosted and maintained by us. You need no server, no database administrator and no IT department.
Upgrades are not projects you schedule and pay for either — improvements arrive continuously, and everyone is on the current version by definition.
- Does my field team need to download an app?
No, and this is deliberate. The merchandising and store-visit screens are built mobile-first — large touch targets, one task per screen — but they are part of GrowerLive itself, opened in whatever browser is already on the phone or tablet.
So there is no app store listing, no install, no separate credentials, and no chance of half your field team running last quarter’s version. Someone hired on Monday is working on Monday, with the same login and the same permissions as everyone in the office.
- Can our customers place their own orders?
Yes. Customers can be given their own scoped login and enter orders directly, seeing only their own locations and their own pricing. One of the brokers we work with runs this way today — their customers enter the orders and the office reviews them rather than transcribing them.
It is the same order screen, the same validation and the same inventory your team uses, which is exactly why it works. There is no second system to keep in sync.
Fit & Capabilities
- What size operation is GrowerLive built for?
Medium-sized growers and brokers in North America — operations big enough that spreadsheets and a homegrown system have stopped keeping up, but not so big that they want a generic enterprise ERP and a systems-integration project.
We are a good fit for growers who want to shape the software around how they already work, and who want to talk to the people who build it. We are a poor fit for anyone who wants to buy a licence, self-serve, and never speak to their vendor.
- Do we have to use all of it?
No. Modules and individual screens are turned on per operation, so your team gets the screens they use rather than a menu of forty they do not.
If you ship in boxes on pallets, the whole rack-packing module stays off and nothing elsewhere expects it to be there. If you do not run promotions, that panel is not on your order screen. Software you do not use should not be clutter you navigate around.
- Does GrowerLive handle pay by scan and vendor-managed inventory?
Yes, and in real depth. When you own the inventory until it rings up at the register, "what did I ship" stops being the interesting question. GrowerLive captures scan data by store and SKU, keeps the history, compares sell-through against what was actually delivered, and drives invoicing from scans rather than shipments.
The electronic data interchange behind those programs is handled natively rather than through a separate translation product — EDI 850 for purchase orders in, 820 for payment and remittance advice back, and 812 for credit and debit adjustments, with full audit trails and correction handling.
- Can it pack racks and carts, and track our containers?
Yes. When an order is saved, GrowerLive works out how it packs onto your racks or carts — which products on which shelf, and how many racks the order needs. Nobody does that arithmetic by hand, and nobody has to redo it when the order changes.
Rack-fill projection appears while the order is still being taken, which turns a freight problem into a sales conversation at the only moment it can still be solved. Returnable containers are tracked by location and customer, so the conversation about a missing count starts from a record rather than a guess.
- Does it understand bench space, not just units?
Yes, and it is one of the things we think most software in this category gets wrong. Every zone can carry a square-footage capacity and items carry their own footprint, so space is a number the system can reason about rather than something living in a grower’s head.
You decide what happens when a zone goes over capacity: block the placement outright, or allow it and flag the overflow for a manager. Different operations want different answers, so it is a setting rather than an assumption we made for you.
Flora & AI
- What does Flora actually do?
Flora is GrowerLive’s data assistant. You ask a question about your operation in plain English — "which stores are under sixty percent sell-through this week" — and get the answer from your live data, with an Excel export a click away.
The part people keep using is what happens next. When Flora produces something useful, you save it as a named report. From then on that report runs without the AI: Flora writes the query once, and afterwards it executes directly. Same numbers every time, instantly, with no model in the loop to interpret anything differently on a Tuesday.
You get natural language as the way you build a report, and ordinary deterministic reporting as the thing you end up with. We think that is the right way round.
- Does GrowerLive forecast demand or reorder automatically?
Not today — and we would rather tell you that here than have you find out in a demo. GrowerLive does not forecast demand and does not place replenishment orders on its own.
What it does instead is make the decision a good one. Sell-through by store and SKU, scans compared against what was actually delivered, stocking percentages, store capacity in square feet, and recent scan history sitting on the order screen while someone is taking the order. The judgement stays with your team, informed by numbers that are genuinely current rather than a model’s guess nobody can audit.
Both forecasting from your own sales history and suggesting replenishment are directions we intend to pursue, and they are on our roadmap alongside point of sale and reading orders straight out of the emails and photographs your customers already send you. What we will not do is describe any of that in the present tense before you can be shown it working on your own data.
- Is it safe to point AI at our production data?
The reasonable objection to AI touching a live system is: what can it break? The answer here is structural rather than reassuring.
Flora connects with a read-only account. Writing is impossible rather than merely disallowed — there is no permission to change anything, so no prompt, mistake or misunderstanding can. And it only ever sees what you see: queries are scoped to the companies and locations your own login covers.
Getting Started
- How long does it take to get up and running?
It depends on how much data has to come across and how much configuration you want up front, so we do not publish a single number — any vendor quoting you one before seeing your data is guessing.
What we do commit to is the shape of it. On-boarding covers data migration, your initial customizations, and a named, easy way to reach us. Training then runs across your first three months, because the second month is when the questions that actually matter show up — not the first week, when everyone is still being shown where the buttons are.
If you are working against a season, tell us the date. Sequencing the roll-out so the parts you need first arrive first is a normal conversation, not a special request.
- We have built our own system over the years. Can you migrate it?
This is the situation we understand best, because it is our own history. GrowerLive began as PAOS, an ordering system built in Access in 2002, which we carried onto a hosted web platform that a grower first used in 2007. We have personally done the migration we would be proposing to you.
Practically: spreadsheet import runs throughout the platform, so a product list, a customer file or a season of history does not need a custom tool — and it is the same path your team later uses for bulk updates. Records can be organised into whatever nested groups your business actually uses, and you can add your own fields to any record type without a release.
The usual reason growers in this position call us is not that their system is bad. It is that the person who built it is retiring. Keeping the custom fit while handing off the maintenance burden is exactly what we do.
- What does GrowerLive integrate with?
QuickBooks for accounting — invoices, credit memos and payments received, with an optional approval step before anything posts. EDI with retail partners. Fleet telematics for live stop ETAs and delivery events. Email from inside the platform, and Excel or CSV import and export throughout.
There is also a documented two-way REST API, and every call is recorded in a transaction log you can search. When a partner says they sent something and your team cannot find it, that gets settled by looking rather than guessing.
Integrations are written against interfaces rather than one vendor, so adding another accounting package or a different telematics provider is configuration work rather than a rebuild. If there is a system you need connected, that is a normal part of working with us.
Pricing & Working With Us
- How much does GrowerLive cost?
GrowerLive is a subscription, billed monthly. We quote per operation rather than publishing a price list, because what you pay depends on which modules you run, how many people use it, and the scale of your operation — and a list price would be wrong for almost everyone.
What we will tell you up front: our contract holds price increases in line with the CPI report, so you are not exposed to an arbitrary rise at renewal. Email sales@growerlive.com or call 877-800-2777 and you will get a real number, not a discovery process designed to avoid giving you one.
- What do you commit to contractually?
Four things, in writing: an NDA covering your data and your business, 97.5% uptime, a 24-hour response time, and price increases held in line with the CPI report.
After go-live, support is proactive rather than reactive — scheduled check-ins rather than waiting for you to report something, plus a quarterly newsletter on what has changed.
- Can we talk to growers who already use it?
Yes, though not by reading a logo wall on this site. We do not publish our clients’ names, because our clients compete with people who attend the same trade shows we do, and a confidentiality commitment that only applies when it is convenient is not one.
What we do instead is arrange reference conversations directly, matched so you are speaking with an operation like yours and not with a competitor. Ask during a demo and we will set it up.
- What happens in a demo?
A conversation first, then the software. We would rather spend the first twenty minutes understanding how you take orders, where your space constraints bite and what your retail programs demand, so that what we show you is your operation rather than a generic tour.
If GrowerLive is not the right fit, we will say so. That is a cheaper outcome for both of us than finding out three months into an implementation.
Ask Us Anything Else
A demo starts with a conversation about how your operation actually runs — and if we are not the right fit, we will tell you.