Selling a quarter, a half, or a whole beef by hanging weight has one hard problem baked into it: you can't invoice anyone until the processor weighs the carcass. The buyer commits in July. The steer goes to the processor in October. The dollar figure doesn't exist until a hook and a scale produce it — and it's a different number for every share.
Almost every guide online solves this the same way: take a deposit up front, then settle the balance on final weight. It's the standard advice, and it works right up until you're sitting at the kitchen table in November with a butcher's weigh sheet, a spreadsheet, and eleven buyers who each owe a different amount you now have to calculate, invoice, and chase.
There's a cleaner way to run it. This guide walks through what hanging weight actually is, the two honest ways to price a share, and a workflow that bills each buyer once, from their real weight, with no deposit to reconcile against anything.
First, what "hanging weight" actually means
This is the single most common source of buyer confusion, and it's worth getting straight before you price anything — because if your customers don't understand it, they'll think they've been shortchanged when their box turns out lighter than the number you quoted.
A live steer gets processed down through two big drops:
- Live weight → hanging (carcass) weight: after the hide, head, organs, and blood are removed, the hanging carcass is roughly 60% of the live animal.
- Hanging weight → take-home packaged weight: after the carcass is aged, deboned, and trimmed into cuts, the buyer takes home roughly 60–70% of the hanging weight.
So a buyer who pays "by the hanging pound" pays for more pounds than end up in their freezer. That's not a trick — it's how the whole industry prices bulk beef — but it needs saying plainly, on the reservation page, before anyone pays.
If you price by hanging weight, the middle bar is the one your rate multiplies. If a customer expects the top bar or the bottom bar, you have a refund conversation coming. Put the definition in writing.
The two honest ways to price a share
There are really only two clean pricing models, and mixing them is where the trouble starts.
Fixed price per share. A half is $1,600, a quarter is $850, full stop. The buyer knows the exact number the day they commit. You absorb the weight risk — a heavy steer is a slightly thinner margin, a light one a slightly fatter one — in exchange for a price nobody has to reconcile. This is the simplest model for the buyer and the easiest to collect early.
By the hanging pound. You set one rate — say $4.25 per pound of hanging weight — and the final bill is that rate times the buyer's actual share of the carcass. This tracks your real cost most closely, but the dollar figure genuinely does not exist until weigh-in.
Notice what's not on that list: a deposit. A deposit isn't a pricing model — it's a financing step bolted onto one of the two above, and it's optional. Most tools make it feel mandatory. It isn't.
Where the deposit-and-balance model goes wrong
Taking a deposit does one useful thing: it locks the buyer in and puts some cash toward your processing bill before the animal is committed. Fair enough. But look at what it costs you on the back end of a by-weight share:
- You collected, say, $500 as a deposit against an unknown total.
- The carcass comes back at 312 lb. At $4.25/lb the share is $1,326.
- Now you have to compute $1,326, subtract the $500 you already took, and invoice the $826 difference — per buyer, by hand.
- If your tool recorded the deposit as its own product sale, that $500 and that $826 don't naturally add up to "this buyer paid $1,326 for their half." Your books show two unrelated line items you have to mentally staple together at tax time.
Every one of those steps is a place to fat-finger a number. Multiply it across a full lot and the deposit model quietly becomes the most error-prone part of your season. The fix isn't a better spreadsheet. It's not netting two numbers against each other in the first place.
A cleaner workflow: reserve the lot, weigh in once, settle the balance
TallyTill's Animal Shares tools take a different path. Instead of a deposit and a balance, you reserve portions of a specific dated lot, and each reservation gets billed exactly once — from the real weight.
A few things about this flow are worth calling out, because they're deliberate:
- Nothing is charged for the meat before weigh-in. On a by-weight lot, reserving a half moves no money toward the beef. There's no deposit to track and nothing to subtract later. The buyer's account simply shows one charge once the weight is in.
- The buyer never sees an estimated total. The reservation page shows "$4.25/lb hanging weight," not a guessed dollar figure. You're never on the hook for a number you quoted before the scale existed — and you'll never have to explain why the "estimate" was wrong.
- Portions can't be oversold. A lot is defined as a number of portions. Two steers might be 16 quarters. As reservations come in, the count draws down, so you don't accidentally promise a ninth eighth of an animal that only has eight.
Fees go on their own lines — never hidden in the meat price
Processing, packaging, labelling, delivery: real costs that don't belong buried in your per-pound rate. Each one is its own itemized fee line, either flat (a $45 processing fee, once per reservation) or per weight unit (delivery at $0.15/lb). A flat fee posts when you confirm the reservation; a per-pound fee posts at weigh-in alongside the meat charge. The buyer sees exactly what each line is — which is both more honest and far easier to defend than a padded rate.
Fixed-price shares: getting paid up front, without a deposit dance
If your reason for taking deposits was cash flow — you want money in before the processing bill lands — you don't need a deposit to get it. Price the share as a fixed lot instead: a half at $1,600, collected in dated instalments (say three payments from confirmation to harvest), or paid in full at reservation.
That gets you the up-front cash and a number the buyer understood from day one, with no final reconciliation because there was never a variable weight in the equation. The instalments settle themselves on their due dates. You get the financing benefit of a deposit without the bookkeeping tax of one.
The legal detail most guides skip
If you're selling custom-exempt (uninspected) beef by the share — the way most small farms move bulk animals — the buyer generally has to own their share of the animal before it's slaughtered. That's why a well-run lot sets a reservations-close date before the processing date, not after: the sale is a live animal reserved ahead of harvest, not packaged meat sold after the fact.
The Animal Shares tools bake that ordering in — a lot's reservation-close date must fall before its processing date — but the responsibility is yours to confirm what your state and your processor require. The "Not for sale" labelling on custom-exempt cuts is the processor's job. Check your state's rules before your first lot; they vary more than you'd expect.
Pork, lamb, and mixed lots work the same way
None of this is beef-specific. A hog share, a lamb, a "whole, half, quarter" of anything you raise runs through the identical flow: create a lot, type your own option labels and portion counts, pick fixed or by-weight pricing, take reservations, weigh in, collect. You name the options in your own words — there are no forced presets — so "Sampler box," "Front quarter," or "Whole hog, split two ways" are all just labels you type.
What it doesn't do (so you're not surprised)
Honest limits matter more than a feature list:
- Cut instructions are free text. Each reservation carries a notes field for what the buyer wants done with their cuts, and it prints on the pickup sheet. It is not a structured cut-sheet builder that talks to your processor's system — it's a clear note, not an integration.
- It runs from the Portal, not the till. Creating lots, taking reservations, and weighing in are back-office jobs you do at a computer. The till only comes in at the end, as one way a buyer can settle up at pickup.
- It's part of the CSA toolset. Animal Shares lives alongside the CSA box tools and is switched on there; you can run animal lots, subscription boxes, or both.
Getting started
If you're selling shares out of a spreadsheet and a group text today, the reserve-then-weigh-in workflow is the part worth changing first — it's where the money errors hide.
Create a free TallyTill account — the Stand plan is $0 per seat with no card required — then switch on the Animal Shares tools in your CSA settings and build your first lot. Set your harvest date, type your share options, and take a reservation before the animal ever leaves the pasture.
You raise the animal once. You should only have to bill for it once, too.