Skal administration and origin registration
An organic certificate rests on one thing: being able to demonstrate that what you sell as organic was also purchased as organic. Skal tests this with a mass balance, annually or once every two years depending on your supervision arrangement, and that balance only holds if purchasing, processing and sales are linked at batch level. If it lives in invoices and a spreadsheet, the inspection becomes a reconstruction.
What the inspection comes down to
Skal Biocontrole checks whether you comply with the European rules for organic production. How often this happens depends on your supervision arrangement. Most companies fall under the normal arrangement and receive a physical inspection every year. Under the low arrangement, Skal schedules a periodic inspection no later than 24 months after the previous one, often already after 22; to qualify you must, among other things, be fully organic, have been certified for more than five years, have had no critical or serious non-conformity in three years, and stay below a turnover limit. The high arrangement, the ten per cent with the highest risk score, gets an extra inspection. The risk model is recalculated every year on 1 October, so your arrangement can shift without you doing anything. For companies that sell to consumers there is a separate arrangement, in which, for example, retail chains are visited on a sample basis. The criteria per arrangement are listed on skal.nl.
The core of every inspection is the mass balance: how much organic product came in, how much was processed or sold, and whether the two match. A difference you cannot explain is a finding. And the longer the period between two inspections, the more there is to reconstruct if you do not keep records continuously.
The inspector also checks the separation between organic and conventional. If you process both, you must be able to show that no mixing has taken place: separate storage, separate production runs or a cleaning step in between, with a record of when that happened.
Where it goes wrong in practice is the unit you count in. Your accounts know invoices and order lines; the inspector knows batches. They point to a delivered batch and ask where the raw material came from and under which certificate it was purchased. As long as those two units aren't linked, every answer is a reconstruction: someone digs out the delivery note, then the goods receipt, then the certificate that was valid at the time. With an inspection every two years, that covers 24 months of batches.
Proving origin starts with the same action as traceability: recording which batch went into which batch, at the moment it happens. How you organise that on the production line is covered under the batch integration app.
How we build your Skal records
Everything hangs on one design choice: the batch as the unit. If purchasing, processing and sales all hang off it, the mass balance follows automatically and the inspection becomes an export.
What comes in, what happens to it and what goes out. For a grower this looks different from a processor or a trader, so the inspector looks at different things too. We define that scope first.
How do you divide a flow: per receipt, per production run, per packaging unit? That determines how finely you can trace later and how heavy the registration becomes on the shop floor. Finer is not always better.
Those two together form the balance, so that is where the build starts. Your own people register a real batch early on with an interim version, because that is where it becomes clear whether the batch structure is workable.
Before handover we walk through the file using the questions an inspector asks: show me where this batch came from and where it went. Anything that can't be shown in two clicks, we adjust.
What the software actually does
Cultivation, processing and trading each demand something different from these records. Six components: at a single link in the chain you may need three, and at a mixed business all six.
Batch as the unit
Every receipt and every production run gets its own batch number with its organic status: fully organic, in conversion or conventional. Everything that happens afterwards hangs off that batch rather than an order line.
Supplier certificates
For each supplier, proof that they are organically certified, with the expiry date. A receipt from a supplier with an expired certificate is flagged at the moment of booking rather than at the inspection.
A mass balance that always adds up
What was purchased as organic, what was processed and at what yield, and what was sold as organic. The system calculates this continuously, so a discrepancy shows up in the week it arises rather than at the annual inspection.
Separating organic and conventional
If you process both, the system records which run had which status and which cleaning step came in between. A conventional run directly after an organic one without cleaning is blocked or flagged, depending on what your own procedure prescribes.
Tracing in both directions
From a delivered batch back to the raw material, and from a raw material batch forward to all the deliveries it ended up in. That is exactly what the inspector asks for in spot checks, and it is also what you need when handling a complaint.
File for inspection day
Everything together per period: balance, certificates, batches and the separation records, exportable in the form the inspector asks for. Preparation becomes a single action instead of a week's work.
Who we build for
Where you sit in the chain determines what the inspector looks at, and whether you also process conventional products determines how demanding it gets. Four types of certified business.
Growers and livestock farmers
Plot registration, crop protection and purchasing of planting material. If you also work under a retail scheme, this overlaps with GlobalG.A.P. and a single registration for both makes sense.
Processors
This is where the requirements are toughest, because recipe, yield and segregation all come together in the balance. It is often combined with your production system, since the run is where the batch originates.
Trade and distribution
You buy and sell without processing, so the balance is simpler but the volume is larger. Your risk lies with supplier certificates and with batches that change status.
Importers
Imports from third countries come with their own documentation requirements and checks. This is a separate flow in your records with its own supporting documents, and it should not run through your regular goods receipts.
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What we deploy follows from your situation. Skal does not offer an open integration that lets business software query a supplier's certificate status, so we do not promise that. The register is filled from your own records and from the certificates your suppliers provide.
If you grow or trade fruit and every delivery must be traceable to a plot and picking date, take a look at our app for fruit origin registration.
Why Appfront
The balance is the test
An inspector starts with the mass balance. That is why we build it not as a report after the fact but as something that stays accurate continuously, so a discrepancy stands out while it can still be explained.
Registering where the work happens
Every step between the action and the registration is a place where the link to the batch gets lost. We design so that scanning is faster than writing it on a list.
Alongside what already runs
Your accounting system knows the invoices and your production system knows the runs. We retrieve those through integrations instead of creating a third set of records.
Honest about our role
We are not a certification body or an organic consultant. We build the system in which your records are created; the substantive assessment remains with Skal and with your own quality function.
Security and privacy
A Skal administration contains little personal data, but it does show who made which registration and which suppliers you use. The latter is commercially sensitive: your purchasing channels and margins can be derived from it. We therefore keep access tight and limit visibility of supplier data to those who need it.
More important is the reliability of the registration itself. In an inspection or a complaint, this file is your evidence, and what counts then is that it was not updated after the fact. A recorded batch or balance entry cannot be changed silently: a correction is visible as a correction and does not overwrite the original. Records that can be altered unnoticed after the fact have no value with Skal and can work against you. How we handle security ourselves is set out in our information security policy; external reports go through our coordinated vulnerability disclosure policy.
Frequently asked questions about Skal record-keeping
It is the reconciliation between what you have purchased as organic and what you have sold as organic, taking processing and yield into account. Skal uses it to establish that you are not selling more as organic than you can substantiate. If the balance does not add up, the question is where the difference comes from, and that is hard to answer months later. Keeping it updated continuously turns that into a small conversation instead of a finding.
For each production run, you record what went in and what came out. The difference is your yield, and it needs to stay within an explainable range. If a run deviates sharply, that is a signal worth looking at, not automatically a problem. We build that range in as something you set yourself, based on your own process.
Yes, and that is precisely the reason to build it. The system records the status of each run and safeguards the separation: separate storage, the order of runs and the cleaning step in between. What exactly needs to happen between an organic and a conventional run is set out in your own procedure; we adopt it and enforce it.
No, and we won't promise that. There is no open integration that allows business software to look up a supplier's status. What does work is recording the certificate once with its expiry date and flagging it ahead of time, plus a portal where your supplier submits a new certificate themselves before the old one expires.
Yes, and for warehouses and cold stores it is a requirement. The app stores data locally and synchronises as soon as there is a connection, showing clearly which records are still pending. We explicitly design what happens when two people have worked on the same batch offline.
In the records, partly; in the approach, no. Food safety schemes ask for checks on hygiene and hazards; Skal asks for origin and separation. What they share is traceability. That is why we link a record to every requirement it satisfies; see IFS and BRCGS audit file.
That follows from the regulations and from what Skal requires in your situation; have your quality function establish it or check with Skal. We set up the system so that the retention period can be configured per document type, and so that data is actually deleted afterwards rather than being kept indefinitely.
That depends on where you sit in the chain and whether processing is involved. A trading company with purchasing and sales is a manageable project; a processor with recipes, yields and separation monitoring is considerably more. We give a substantiated estimate after the discovery phase, once we have gone through your flow.
Building Skal record-keeping?
Tell us how your flow works and how much work inspection preparation currently takes, and we will help you think through the batch structure, the balance and the separation monitoring. We build this as a standalone application and as part of a broader custom software project. Origin under the deforestation regulation falls under a separate regime; see EUDR software.