Situation

Laird Feed is a small custom feed mixer based in Gothenburg Nebraska. They move literal tons of product quickly, and they compete on mix quality, responsiveness, and customer service. They process 100–150 orders per month, so even small inefficiencies compound fast.

Before the project, each order started as a notecard in the office. That card was hand-carried to the mixing shed. After mixing, the feed mixer wrote down how much of each ingredient was used and brought those notes back to the office. From there, the order was entered line-by-line into QuickBooks to price items and remove inventory. The office manager then did longhand math to calculate ingredient totals, plus mixing fees, delivery fees, and any other charges, and went back into QuickBooks again to produce the final invoice.

Because the workflow bounced between paper, people, and systems, it was slow and hard to audit. In some cases, a single order could take up to a week end-to-end. Changes were also painful once the day moved on, because details were scattered across handwritten notes and manual entries.

Inventory pressure made the problem bigger. Laird Feed moves through product quickly but isn’t ready to expand holding capacity yet, so timing replenishment matters. They had been relying heavily on supplier deliveries with high delivery fees, and delivery timing didn’t always align with what they needed in the moment. That created risk and often forced decisions without clean inventory visibility. They also wanted more control over freight and timing, but that was difficult to scale without clearer inventory visibility and a more repeatable workflow.

They also suspected shrinkage in corn feed, but they didn’t have reliable tracking to confirm how much was being lost or where to start investigating. Without that data, pricing confidence was limited, because they couldn’t clearly account for shrink in a consistent, defensible way.

Solution

ProsperSpark rebuilt Laird Feed’s order-to-invoice workflow in Airtable so the process could run in one place instead of bouncing between notecards, the mixing shed, longhand math, and repeated QuickBooks entry. The goal was simple: capture the order once, track what was actually mixed, apply consistent pricing rules, and keep inventory accurate enough to drive better replenishment and hauling decisions.

The new workflow starts with structured order entry in Airtable. Instead of a notecard getting hand-carried across the operation, the order details live in a shared system that both the office and the mixer can rely on. As mixes are produced, ingredient usage is recorded directly in the same workflow. That creates a clean operational record and removes the need to “reconstruct the story” later.

To reduce custom entry and make repeatable work faster, ProsperSpark built 26 recipe/amount templates and supporting automations. For common mixes, the team can start from a known template instead of re-keying the same information over and over, which improves consistency and reduces the chance of missing a step.

ProsperSpark also embedded the pricing components that used to require longhand math. Mixing charges, delivery fees, and handling scenarios are applied through consistent logic, so the totals don’t depend on someone recalculating by hand each time.

On the inventory side, ProsperSpark built bulk and non-bulk inventory tracking with practical day-to-day interfaces, including views for trucks and totes. Inventory updates flow from actual usage, which gives the team a reliable view of what’s on hand, what’s moving fastest, and when replenishment is needed. That visibility is what enables smarter purchasing decisions, including the ability to haul product themselves when timing matters.

QuickBooks remains the accounting system of record. Airtable now acts as the operational system that makes invoice prep faster, more consistent, and easier to audit.

Implementation was handled through a deep dive into their current workflow via calls and emails, followed by live training and feedback cycles so the system matched real usage before it was considered “done.”

Results

The biggest change was speed and control at scale. Laird Feed has been processing 100–150 orders per month, and what used to take up to a week from order intake to invoice completion now takes under two minutes in the new workflow. Because the work is captured as it happens, it’s also easier to verify and far easier to keep consistent. With tighter inventory visibility and a more repeatable order-to-delivery system, Laird Feed brought on a dedicated driver, took more hauling in-house, and started passing meaningful freight savings on to customers.

• Cycle time: at least several hours up to 1 week per order → under 2 minutes

• Throughput supported: 100–150 orders/month running through a single workflow.

• Single source of truth: Orders, mixes, deliveries, and inventory updates now run through one system.

• Auditability: Delivery dates and “Delivered” timestamps are captured consistently, which makes follow-ups and verification straightforward.

• Inventory-driven decisions: With reliable inventory visibility, Laird Feed can plan replenishment based on what’s actually on hand and what’s moving, rather than relying on supplier delivery timing. That allows them to haul product themselves when needed.

• Capacity to scale: Laird Feed was able to bring on an additional employee (a dedicated driver), which helped them take more control over hauling and timing and extend freight savings to customers.

• Freight cost reduction: With the ability to haul product internally, freight costs dropped an average of 53% and those savings are being passed onto customers.
• Pricing Confidence: Inventory tracking confirmed about 2% shrinkage on corn feed, which is within an acceptable range, allowing Laird Feed to price more confidently with real data instead of guesses.

This project reflects ProsperSpark’s system-first approach: take a messy, paper-based workflow, map the real handoffs, then build a simple tool people will actually use. By moving orders, mixing, delivery tracking, and inventory into one Airtable workflow with built-in templates and pricing logic, Laird Feed cut order-to-invoice cycle time from days to minutes, gained reliable inventory visibility, and created the operational foundation to support higher volume and bring hauling in-house. The result is less scramble, more consistency, and real freight savings they can pass on to customers as they grow.