Excel, QuickBooks, and paper — now one system.
Ecotone's native nursery merged handwritten counts, spreadsheets, and invoicing into a single system — and took inventory onto a tablet, right into the propagation house.
Samantha Thomason
- Operation
- Native tree & shrub nursery within an ecological restoration company
- Grows
- Native trees and shrubs in containers — wetland to upland species
- Origin
- Started to supply the company's own wetland and stream restoration projects
- Customers
- Their own restoration projects, government, nonprofits, landowners
A complicated spreadsheet, hand counts, and a once-a-month PDF.
Ecotone kept inventory in a large, complicated Excel spreadsheet, invoiced in QuickBooks but used little else, and left the accounting team on a separate system. Everything was broken into pieces. Counting inventory meant tallying by hand on pen and paper, then walking back to a desk to key it all in.
Picking slips were made by hand, and crews in the field struggled to find where products were. For customers, the only availability was a PDF posted once a month — too tedious to update more often, so it rarely reflected reality.
One system to merge everything they were doing in pieces.
Ecotone had been looking for a couple of years for a fit for their size — not too large, not too small. They weren't seriously evaluating anyone else; what drew them in was the customer service and the early conversations with the Plantiful team, first made by Samantha's boss at a convention.
The feature that mattered most was consolidation: one place to hold inventory, build invoices, reserve plants to orders, and create purchase orders — instead of stitching the work together across separate tools.
Comfortable within a couple of weeks.
The longest part of onboarding was getting higher-up approval; once that cleared, getting the old inventory into Plantiful was quick, and the team handled most of it. Plantiful provided heavy support and training in the early stages before letting Ecotone run on its own.
Samantha felt comfortable within a couple of weeks, helped by user-friendly screens, how-to videos, and weekly meetings where she brought a list of questions and the team worked through every one.
Right away, the Plantiful team was meeting with us and guiding us through the process step by step. They handled pretty much everything, and gave us so much support and training in those early stages before letting us run with it.
A tablet in the field — and in the propagation house.
Allocating plants to jobs and customers used to be one of the most time-consuming steps; now Samantha creates the order, formalizes it, and allocates the plants all at once. A tablet lets her edit inventory directly in the field, instead of handwriting notes and re-entering them later.
The propagator carries the same tablet into the propagation house, entering what she sowed — species and growing information — as she works. Picking tickets, which the nursery never had before, have been a favorite with the crews pulling orders.
Our propagator can take the tablet right into the propagation house and enter what she sowed — the species, the growing information — as she works. Eliminating handwritten notes has saved so much time.
Out of a bygone day, and able to compete.
Without the switch, Ecotone figures it would still be doing cash and check sales with handwritten, Excel-based inventory. Plantiful brought the nursery into the current age and let it compete with rivals running modern systems — including accepting credit cards for the first time in the nursery's history.
Item-by-item tracking of how crops cycle through the nursery is something Ecotone could never do before, and it's already revealing patterns to build on as the business grows.
My customers can search our live inventory by species, by price, even by wetland indicator status — and it updates the moment I make a change.
The features behind the story.
Production
Enter sowing and crop data on a tablet, in the house.
See how it worksAvailability
Live inventory searchable by species, price, and wetland status.
See how it worksPayments
Accept credit cards for the first time.
See how it worksOnline Ordering
Customers see live availability, not a monthly PDF.
See how it worksHear from more nurseries.
Online ordering that fueled real growth.
Luke Venable · Owner & General Manager, Forest Lake Greenhouses
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Joanna D'Ancona · Office Manager, Sales & Marketing, Sampson Nursery
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Jennifer Langston · Sales & Inventory Management, Jericho Farms
Read the case studyConfidence to delegate and scale.
Chris Holly · Chief Operating Officer, Sandhill Native Growers
Read the case studySee what Plantiful does for your nursery.
Book a walkthrough with our team and see how Plantiful works for an operation like yours.