What does Meat Cut Pro do?

Meat Cut Pro has been designed to help small butchers with various aspects of their business:

1. Meat Cut Pro provides the butcher with a computerised method of taking Customer orders for cutting up carcasses, printing the order, calculating the bill and printing the invoice.

Figure 1: Example of taking an order to cut up beef

In the days before computers if a customer needed a carcass cut up, butchers would manually fill out a form they had made, describing how a carcass should be cut up, for example, how many steaks does the customer want from the rump? What thickness? How does he want them packaged? This form would have to be done in duplicate, if the butcher was to let the customer have a copy as well.

There are many different ways to cut up a carcass. So, in order to simplify the ordering process, some butchers would give their customers a few set options for cutting up a carcass. For example, Option 1 could be an order made of mostly steaks and ground beef; Option 2 might have a focus on stew meat and roasts.

Once the form is filled in, the butcher would cut up the carcass. Having cut it up and packaged it, he would then have to price things out: so much per pound for the dress weight, so much per pound for meat that is vacuum packed. There might be a sausage charge or a charge for extra lean ground beef. All this makes quite a complicated mathematical calculation.

The invoice would then have to be prepared. All this took time and organisation.

Suppose the same customer comes in a year later requesting another cow to be cut up. He wants it done the same way as before. Now where is the old form? It could be in any one of ten boxes. The form is most probably dog eared, covered in blood and fit for the garbage.

Meat Cut Pro allows you, the butcher to take the customer's order on the computer. You only need to enter information that is needed. So, if vacuum packing is assumed, you don't have to enter that information into the computer. You can then print out 2 copies of the form: one for the customer and one for the butcher. Having cut up the carcass, you write any relevant comments (dress weight, amount of sausage, etc.) on the back of the form. The information is then fed back into the computer. The computer automatically calculates the charges including taxes, and at the click of a mouse button an invoice can be printed out.

Since much of the custom cut meat cannot be resold, Meat Cut Pro can produce a sheet of labels containing a short 3 line message, and a label can be placed on each package.

If the customer returns a year later requesting a similar order, then all you need to do is base a new order on the old one: just a few mouse clicks. As for those old, bloody dog-eared forms, you can file them in the garbage because you won't need them again.

2. Meat Cut Pro provides the butcher with a way to track costs of producing various meat products.

How much does it cost to make products like pepperoni? Which is cheapest: buy the ground pork already ground or buy the carcass and make ground pork yourself? Is it cost effective for a butcher to repackage a box of rib-eye steaks or should he only make rib-eye steaks from a carcass?

Figure 2: Calculating the cost of a product

Meat Cut Pro can calculate the cost of calculating making various products in different ways. You need to tell the computer:

The value of the meat in comparison with the whole carcass
The suppliers costs of each item that goes to make up the product.
Your labour costs and the time taken to produce the product.
3 percentage overhead costs to add to items that
- come in and go out again without modification, e.g. a bottle of barbecue sauce
- Need to be cut up and packaged .e.g. rump steak
- Need to be cooked e.g. pepperoni

With this information, the program can calculate the cost of making a product. This information can be used for setting product prices.

3. Meat Cut Pro can produce sales information that can be sent to customers using email or a personalised letter.

Figure 3: Transfering an email message to your email program

If the butcher has a sale on various products, he can let his customers know by email or a personalised form letter. When a person first becomes a customer, you can ask if they want to be on their mailing list to receive sales letters or emails.

You compose the email in Meat Cut Pro, and then click the "Transfer to Emailer" button. This transfers the title, message and addresses to your emailer program, so that they are ready to be sent.

Having composed a letter in Meat Cut Pro, you click the print command and it will print out personalised letters to all your customers who have requested to be on your mailing list. Just fold them and put in a window envelope ready for posting.

4. Meat Cut Pro can produce "We value your custom" letters.

Suppose a customer has not returned to the shop for over two years. Perhaps they have forgotten about the excellent service you gave them? Having composed a "we value your custom" letter in Meat Cut Pro, you can print and send this personalised letter to any former customer who last ordered from you between 2 given dates.

Figure 4: A "We value your custom" letter

5. Meat Cut Pro can produce letter sized posters.

If you want to advertise a sale on a particular item, Meat Cut Pro can produce letter sized poster for each item on sale. Just type in the text and click the print button. It is as easy as that, and is particularly useful if you want to produce a small poster quickly without getting wrapped up in some graphics program.

Figure 5: A Sales Flyer

6. Meat Cut Pro can produce a report to help you with your accounting.

Meat Cut Pro is not an accounting program. However, it can produce a print out a summary of all the orders between two dates, giving: the date of the order, the date the transaction was completed, the name of the customer, the name of the carcass that was cut up, the net charge, the tax paid and the method of payment.