Farmer guide

From install to first pickup. The short version: set up your farm once, create a share product, and CutSheetPro carries every order from deposit to settled balance.

1. One-time setup

1. Install CutSheetPro from your invite link. It appears under Apps in your Shopify admin.
2. Open Settings and fill in your farm identity. Farm name is what buyers see on every email ("Miller Farm via CutSheetPro"). Reply-to email is where buyer replies land — use the inbox you actually read.
3. Skim the email templates. The cut-sheet email and pickup email come with sensible defaults. Edit them if you want your own voice; placeholders like {customer_name}, {share}, {farm_name}, {cutsheet_link} and {order_name} are filled in per buyer.
4. Check the cut-sheet templates under Templates. Each species ships with a butcher-standard default that covers what most buyers want — it's the form your buyers fill out, and they customize their own cuts on it. Most farms change nothing here. If you do customize and want to undo it, there's a reset-to-default button.

2. Create a share product

1. Create a normal product in Shopify first — title, photos, description. Something like "Grass-Fed Beef Shares — Fall 2026". Don't worry about variants or price; CutSheetPro manages those.
2. In CutSheetPro, click "New share product" and pick that product.
3. Set your numbers:
   • Species — beef, hog, or lamb (picks the cut-sheet form)
   • Smallest share sold — whole, half, or quarter
   • Quarter style — "split half" quarters (everyone gets a cross-section, one price) or true front/rear quarters, each with its own price per pound
   • Price per lb (hanging weight) — your rail price; this is what the final bill is computed from
   • Deposit (whole animal) — a buyer pays this times their fraction: half share = half the deposit
   • Est. hanging weight min/max — so buyers know what to expect
4. Save. CutSheetPro creates a "Share size" option on the product with a variant per share size, priced at the right fraction of the deposit. If you change the numbers later, the variants update to match.

3. Selling shares

Buyers can reach a share three ways:

• Your store, like any product — the share product is a normal Shopify product; buyers pick a share size and check out.
• The open-shares board at yourstore.com/apps/cutsheet — a page listing every animal that still has room, with what's left on each. Put it in your store menu: in Shopify admin go to Online Store → Navigation, open your main menu, click Add menu item, name it "Meat Shares", paste /apps/cutsheet into the Link field (it won't autocomplete — that's fine), and save.
• Invite links — every partially-filled animal has copy-able invite links on your CutSheetPro home page ("we've got a rear quarter left, want it?"). If a group wants a whole animal to themselves, open the animal and hit "Hide from storefront" to make it invite-only.

When a deposit order is paid, CutSheetPro records the share, pools it into an animal, and emails the buyer their personal cut-sheet link. Pooling respects anatomy — you'll never owe someone a third rear quarter.

4. Cut sheets

Each buyer gets their own cut-sheet form link by email the moment their deposit is paid. The form covers the standard choices per species — steak thickness, roast size, ground vs. stew, and so on — with defaults already selected, so a buyer who does nothing still gets a sensible order. Buyers who care can change whatever they like.

You can see who has and hasn't submitted on each animal's page, and copy any buyer's form link to resend it. When the animal goes to the processor, forms lock automatically.

5. Processing day

1. Open the animal and click "Mark at processor". This locks every cut sheet so instructions can't change under the butcher's knife. Print or share the submitted cut sheets with your processor.
2. When the kill sheet comes back, enter the hanging weight. Type the whole-animal weight and hit "Save weights & compute balances". Each share defaults to its fraction of the whole; if the processor weighed pieces separately (front and rear quarters usually differ), enter per-share weights in the table first.
3. Click "Send balance invoices". Each buyer's balance is their share's hanging weight × your price per pound, minus the deposit they already paid. CutSheetPro creates a Shopify draft order per buyer and Shopify emails them an invoice with a payment link — the money lands in your store like any other order. If an animal came in light and a deposit more than covered someone's share, CutSheetPro marks them settled and shows the refund amount; issue it against their deposit order in Shopify.

6. Pickup

1. Once everyone has paid, click "Mark ready for pickup". Every paid buyer gets the pickup email (your template, your farm name).
2. As buyers collect their meat, hit "Picked up" on their row. When every row reads Picked up, that animal is done.

What to expect from the emails

• Buyers see your farm's name as the sender — e.g. "Miller Farm via CutSheetPro" — with the sending address notifications@cutsheet.justarobot.online. When a buyer hits reply, the reply goes to your reply-to inbox, not to us.
• Balance invoices come from Shopify, not CutSheetPro — they're ordinary Shopify draft-order invoices with a payment link, and the money lands in your store like any other order.
• Prefer your own mail account? Add an SMTP URL in Settings and CutSheetPro sends through it instead — everything else works the same.

Going live after your dry run

Ran the Getting started checklist with a test order? Before real buyers arrive, clean up after it:

1. Open the test animal and click "Hide from storefront" — a half-open test animal would otherwise sit on your shares board where real buyers could join it.
2. Edit the test share product in CutSheetPro and turn Active off; delete (or keep unpublished) the test product in Shopify.
3. Create your real share product — real photos, real pricing, published — and give Settings one last look, since your farm name and reply-to email are what real buyers will see.
4. Consider a soft start: sell your first animal to customers you know using invite links before announcing the shares board to your whole list. Your first settlement cycle deserves forgiving participants.

Questions your buyers will ask are answered in the buyer FAQ — feel free to copy it onto your own site or into your emails.