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Price & market
How to track your FFB income month by month (and stop losing dealer slips)
The dealer’s slip is proof of one sale. What you need is the pattern across all of them — and that lives somewhere other than a drawer.
Almost every smallholder already has proof of every sale — the dealer’s printed or handwritten slip. The problem isn’t the record; it’s that thirty of them in a drawer don’t answer the one question that matters: is this month better or worse than last month, and why?
The slip-in-a-drawer problem
A slip tells you one tonnage, one price, one date. It doesn’t tell you that this month’s round yielded less than the same lot did three months ago, or that your average price has been drifting down for six weeks while the news says CPO is up. Those are the questions a slip can’t answer on its own — only a running total can.
The minimum worth recording
Whatever method you use, five fields turn a pile of slips into a usable record:
- Date of the sale
- Lot, if you have more than one
- Tonnage sold
- Price per tonne actually paid
- Buyer (dealer or mill name) — useful later if you ever compare channels
Three ways to do it
| Method | Good for | Breaks down when |
|---|
| Exercise book, one line per sale | Zero setup, works anywhere | You want a monthly total — someone has to add it all by hand |
| WhatsApp message to yourself | Fast to log right at the ramp | Searching six months back for a specific lot |
| An app that totals as you go | Automatic monthly and per-lot totals, no arithmetic | Never, if it’s built for this |
Why the monthly view matters
A single sale is noise — fruit ripeness, a slightly different grader, a dealer having a quiet week can all shift one number. A month smooths that out and shows you the thing that actually matters: whether this lot, this season, is paying what it should. That comparison is only possible once the slips stop being individual pieces of paper and start being one running list.
Frequently asked
Do I need to keep the physical slips once I’ve logged them?
Keep them for a season at least — they’re your proof if a dealer’s number is ever disputed. Once logged somewhere with a running total, though, the slip itself stops being the only record.
What if I sell to more than one dealer?
Record the buyer on each entry. Over a few months you’ll be able to see whether one channel consistently pays better — something impossible to spot from separate piles of slips.
Is a spreadsheet good enough?
It works, and is far better than nothing — the main cost is that it needs to be opened and filled in on a computer, at a desk, rather than logged at the ramp on the phone already in your pocket.
Log it at the ramp, see the total instantly
SawitSync’s harvest form takes 20 seconds per sale and totals every lot, every month, automatically — on the phone you already have with you.
Get started free