Show the premium reached the member.
Fairtrade certification is mostly an accounting and governance discipline: who is a member, what they delivered, what the organisation was paid, and what the assembly decided to do with the premium. Tracebud keeps that record as it happens rather than the month before the audit.
We adapt the live EUDR platform to Fairtrade, with 2–3 partners.
You shape what ships — and keep preferential terms for your entire contract duration.
Not ready?
What the audit asks for
Pull the five files the audit asks for.
Nothing on this list is unreasonable. It becomes a crisis because each part lives with a different person: the register with the secretary, the deliveries in a notebook at the washing station, the premium decision in the minutes of a meeting nobody typed up.
How the premium reaches a member
The premium has to reach the last kilo.
The money moves down the same tree the coffee came up, and every hop is a record rather than a meeting.
Forty-eight members have not collected yet. They are named on the register rather than rounded away, which is the part an auditor asks about.
How it works
Follow one premium down to one receipt.
The same delivery, followed from the scale at the gate to the member’s share of the premium and the line an auditor pulls on. Two products: the Field App the clerk and the member use, and the Dashboard the union runs on.
Oct · Field App
The receipt exists before the premium does.
Every delivery weighed and receipted to a named member at the gate, offline. The member walks away with a number, and the premium has something to attach to.
Jan · Dashboard
The premium accrues off the volume, not a guess.
Only the volume actually sold on Fairtrade terms earns premium, and each lot in that figure can be opened back to its receipts.
Apr · Field App
The member sees their own share.
Not a figure announced at a meeting. The allocation the assembly decided, against the kilos that member actually delivered, in their own app.
Jun · Dashboard
The auditor gets the trail, not a binder.
Premium income, the assembly decision, the allocation and every member payment, in one register that reconciles. The audit becomes a reading exercise.
The same register, receipts and member list are what an organic or Rainforest Alliance file asks for. One deployment, three regimes, one plan.
The member register
Membership is the certificate.
Small producer organisations are certified on who their members are and how the organisation is run. A register that drifts out of date takes the premium calculation, the delivery records and the democratic decisions with it.
- Members, not headcountsEach one named, with their plots, their household and the date they joined the organisation.
- Democratic control leaves a traceAssembly attendance and decisions are recorded against the period they apply to.
- Eligibility is checkableLand area per member comes from walked boundaries rather than a declaration on a form.
- Producers hold their own copyMembership, deliveries and payments sit on the member’s phone, so the register can be verified from both ends.
Register, live
- Active members2,100
- Joined this season84
- Left or inactive31
- With walked plots96%
- With a delivery this season1,908
Members join, leave, inherit land and split plots continuously. The register is the same object the delivery records and the premium allocation point at, so it cannot quietly diverge from them.
Premium, decided and spent
The assembly decides. The record shows what happened next.
Premium use is a democratic decision of the members, and the plan behind it is auditable. Where organisations get into trouble is the distance between the minute that records the decision and the payments or projects that followed it.
- Member payout65%Paid per kilo deliveredCalculated from the same delivery records the audit checks, and receipted to each member.EvidenceA signed receipt per member, with the date and amount.
- Productivity and quality22%Invested back into the cropNursery stock, pruning campaigns, wet mill repairs: the things that raise the price next season.EvidenceThe campaign, the plots reached, what was spent — and the work photographed where it stands, dated.
- Organisation13%Running the organisationThe internal control system, extension staff and the audit itself, which are real costs of being certified.EvidenceCost lines tied to the plan the assembly approved.
Tracebud is not Fairtrade and does not certify anyone. Standards, minimum prices, premium rules and audits belong to Fairtrade International and its certifier. We hold the membership, delivery, payment and decision records that an audit works through.
Beyond the minimum price
Reference prices need actual incomes.
Fairtrade publishes Living Income Reference Prices for several crops, built from a benchmark, a viable farm size, a target yield and the cost of producing sustainably. Paying one is a decision; knowing whether it closed the gap for a given household requires the household’s own numbers.
- BenchmarkWhat a decent living costsAn Anker-based benchmark for the district, published independently and updated for inflation.
- ActualWhat the household earnedCrop income from receipts, plus what the household declares from other sources, per member rather than sampled.
- GapWhether the price closed itThe difference, distributed across members, so a reference price can be judged on its effect rather than its existence.
The living income work has its own page, because it applies whether or not you certify: how the gap gets measured.
If you already collected data
Bring what you already have.
Member lists and boundaries assembled for Fairtrade audits import in bulk — the data you already gave the certifier is your starting point here.
XLSX · 480 KB · one upload
1,038members imported
- From your audit files — the certifier packet is the starting point
- Certificates attached — documents land with the members they cover
- 0 duplicates — existing records matched, not doubled
CSV, XLSX or paste a list — templates for every format. Errors show before anything is saved.
Questions we get.
Does this make us Fairtrade certified?+
No. Fairtrade International sets the standards and an independent certifier audits against them. What we do is hold the records that audit examines, so preparing for it stops being a month of reconstruction.
Our members cannot all read.+
The producer app works in fifteen languages with voice and picture prompts, and a receipt is a number, a date and a name. In practice literacy is less of a barrier than a smartphone-shaped form built for an office.
We are also Rainforest Alliance certified. Do we run two systems?+
One register, one set of plots, one inspection history. The two standards ask for different reports off the same records, and both exports come from here.
Can a buyer see our premium accounts?+
Only what you grant. Producers and the organisation own these records; buyers see the part that concerns the volume they bought, which is usually enough for their own reporting.
Stop rebuilding the file every audit.
Import the member register, issue digital receipts for this season’s deliveries, and record the premium decision where the payments will be recorded too. The next audit becomes an export.