What you can do
Pass every audit, calmly
HACCP checks, organic balance, alcohol reporting and ESG — built in, kept current as you work, ready when the inspector calls.
How it works
Compliance as a by-product of doing the work
Set your checks
Define HACCP control points and quality steps on your processes once.
Log as you go
Record checks and readings during production — no separate paperwork.
Report on demand
Organic balance, alcohol and ESG reports generate from data you already captured.
What powers it
The reports regulators ask for
Made for the rules small EU producers actually face.
- HACCP control points & logging
- EU organic balance reporting
- Alcohol / excise reporting
- Certifications tracking
- ESG / VSME sustainability reporting
What an organic balance report has to show
Fødevarestyrelsen's guidance sets out the shape of a balanceopgørelse: for every organic raw material and every finished product, the opening stock, what came in, what production consumed, what production made, what went out as sales or waste, and the closing stock — then the difference between that calculated closing and what you physically counted. fermt renders exactly those columns from movements already in the system, for any period you choose.
The difference line is the one an inspector reads first. fermt measures it against everything that moved through the product in the period rather than against the closing stock. A three-kilo gap on eight tonnes of throughput reads as 0.04 %, instead of looking alarming next to a nearly empty shelf — and a large gap on a product that barely moved stops hiding behind a big denominator.
The guidance prescribes no tolerance, so nothing is filtered out. Every product with a non-zero difference appears, whatever its size, which is the position you want to be in when someone asks whether the list is complete.
- Opening, receipts, production, consumption, sales, waste and adjustments per product
- Difference against the physical count, as a quantity and as a share of period throughput
- Raw materials and finished goods separated, the way the balance opgørelse expects
- Any date range, exported to PDF or Excel
HACCP that lives inside the production order
A HACCP plan belongs to the step it covers, not to a binder on a shelf. In fermt the plan attaches to a step in the production flow, and the flow resolves the recipe chain when it runs — so the checks appear on the step the operator is working on, at the moment they are working on it.
Readings are recorded against the batch as the work happens. There is no second system to reconcile afterwards and no transcription step where the record and the reality quietly drift apart. When the plan changes, it changes on the step, and every run from that point carries the new version.
Certificates, duty and ESG from the same records
Organic and conformity certificates attach to the batches they cover. Looking up a batch shows which certificate applied on the day it was made, rather than only which certificates the company happens to hold today — which is the question that actually gets asked when a specific delivery is queried.
Alcohol duty and EMCS reporting draw on the same movements, as does VSME sustainability reporting. Nothing here is a separate module you remember to fill in: the reports are a view over work you had to record anyway.
Organic and conventional on the same site
Very few producers are wholly one or the other. An organic line runs alongside a conventional one, sharing tanks, staff, packaging and usually a warehouse, and what an inspector wants to understand is how you keep them apart. Organic status is held on the product itself, so the balance separates the two without you keeping a second set of books for it.
Keeping the two apart physically is your procedure; what the system adds is that the records do not depend on how you did it. The balance is right whether the lines share a warehouse or not, and a product that held organic stock through the whole period without moving once still appears on it, with an opening and a closing that match. Stock that sat still is the easiest thing for a report to lose and the most awkward to be missing when someone is adding up what you hold.
Rebuilding a period from its documents
Sometimes the records exist but not in the system: a period kept in spreadsheets, a season's production in a folder, an inspection with a date on it. A past period can be entered after the fact, each document dated to when it happened rather than to the day it was typed, and the balance for it comes out the same way as for a period recorded live.
That ordering is deliberate, and it is what makes a reconstruction defensible. The documents are what an inspector asks to see, so a balance derived from them can always be traced back to one. A figure that exists only as a movement total has nothing behind it to show.
Questions we get
Compliance questions we get asked
Does this replace our organic accounts spreadsheet?
For the balance itself, yes. The report produces the per-product opening, movement and closing figures with the difference against your count, for whatever period you ask for. What it cannot replace is the paperwork behind the movements — count sheets, roasting or production records, supplier certificates — because the guidance expects the balance to reference those documents, not stand in for them.
What should we do when a physical count disagrees with the system?
Book it. The guidance is explicit that a counted balance must be regulated into the accounts with a reference to the count sheet and a note explaining larger differences. A dated, named adjustment is far stronger in front of an inspector than a difference nobody can account for — and it is what fermt records, rather than silently overwriting the figure.
How often do we need to close the accounts?
Check your own procedure before assuming annually. Many organic procedures commit the business to a monthly close and a monthly physical count with a count sheet per storage area, which is a heavier cadence than most producers realise they have signed up to. fermt will generate the balance for any period, so a monthly close costs you the time it takes to count.
Do we have to record every raw material movement by hand?
No. Goods receipts bring material in, production orders consume it and produce output, and sales take it out — the balance is assembled from those, not from a separate compliance log. The only things entered specially are the exceptions: waste, write-offs, transfers to non-organic production and the results of a physical count.
We are not organic. Is any of this relevant?
The organic balance is not, but the rest is. HACCP control points, batch records, certificate expiry, alcohol duty and EMCS filings and VSME sustainability reporting apply regardless of organic status, and they run on the same production and stock records.
Who relies on this
Crafts that lean on this most
Ready to get out of spreadsheets?
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