The single most useful thing to understand about TallyTill's CSA module is this: a share is a season, not a product.
That one idea explains the cadence field, the two dates, why next year needs a new share, and why the terms lock partway through. Get it and the rest follows.
What you fill in
CSA → Shares & sites (/portal/share-plans) → New share.
- A name members will recognise — "2027 Full Veg Share"
- One product from your catalog that stands for the box
- What a box costs
- How often boxes go out
- Which weekday they're collected
- The season's start and end dates
- Whether members pay in instalments or when they collect
Saving draws nothing and charges nobody. You can build next season's share in January.
The cadence does the arithmetic
From the cadence, the weekday and the two dates, TallyTill works out every collection day in the season and shows them on the share's page. Those exact days are what boxes get drawn for.
This is worth checking the moment you save. If the list of dates looks wrong — a week missing, the wrong day, one too many — the cadence or the season dates are wrong. Fix those. Don't try to fix individual orders; they're drawn from the dates, not the other way round.
Next year is a new share
Not an edit to this one. That's deliberate: it's what keeps this year's boxes and this year's statements saying what they said. A share you edited in October would quietly rewrite what happened in July.
The two ways members pay
The share's page lists every instalment with its date and amount, plus the season total, so you can see the whole schedule at a glance.
The thing to plan around: instalments produce a schedule and a balance. They don't produce a charge. If you're used to a platform that auto-charges a saved card, this will feel different — you'll want a routine for looking at who owes what. Customers (/portal/customers) is where balances and credits live, and there's a report of who's behind.
When the terms lock
On a share paid in instalments, the moment the first instalment lands on somebody's balance, the terms freeze. The price, the season, the collection day, the payment plan and the box product are fixed from then on.
You can still rename the share, change its note, and change which day boxes are drawn for. Everything that would alter what a member agreed to, you can't.
This is a feature, not a limitation. A member who signed up for a twenty-week season at a set price should not find those numbers different in August.
It does not apply to a share set to "when they collect." Nothing has been charged in advance, so nothing stops you editing it — which means an edit mid-season quietly changes what future boxes are worth. If the terms genuinely need to change, make a new share either way.
"Close to new members" is not "stop"
It takes the share off your sign-up page. That's all it does.
Everyone already on it keeps their boxes, their payments and their balance. The nightly job keeps drawing boxes exactly as before. Closing a share is what you do when the season is full, not when it's over.
Where the agreement goes
Most CSA farms run a membership agreement — the season-long document covering pickup responsibility, shared risk, and whether shares are refundable. It's close to universal in the category, and the refund term is the one that matters most when somebody asks for money back in July.
TallyTill doesn't store it. There's no signature capture and no consent record on the sign-up form, which collects a name, an email, a share and a pickup site. If you use an agreement today, keep using it exactly as you do — a form, a PDF, a signature service, whatever you have. Nothing about the share plan replaces it.
A worked example
A twenty-week summer season, Wednesdays, starting the first week of June, with members paying in three instalments:
- Create the share with cadence weekly, weekday Wednesday, and the two dates.
- Check the collection-day list on the share's page — you should count twenty Wednesdays.
- Set the three instalments and their dates. April, May, June is common.
- Add your sites and their capacities.
- Open it to new members.
When the first instalment hits the first member's balance in April, the terms lock. Everything after that is the nightly job drawing boxes and you building them each Wednesday.
Next: pickup sites, capacity and surcharges, or the full setup sequence if you're starting from nothing.
Create a free account — CSA is included on every plan, no credit card required to start.