Your 14-day trial has one job: rehearse the inspection.

You already know what FourFoxes does. What you don't know yet is whether it works on your floor, with your products and your people, in an ordinary production week. The trial answers that: you see how it works, run real batches, and find out whether it fits.

Fourteen days is plenty if you spend them on the right thing. Skip the feature tour. Rehearse the moment the software exists for: someone walks in and asks to see your records.

Every new account starts a 14-day trial of the Producer plan with no credit card, and Producer's limits apply the whole time. That means up to 10 users and unlimited batches. Bring your team. Log every batch you actually run.

01. Day one: product types, then products, then batches

Order matters here. Every batch belongs to a product, and every product belongs to a product type. The type carries the process defaults, and the product carries the food safety checks.

At signup, FourFoxes asks what you make. Answer it. The Today dashboard then stages a starter setup matched to your answer: a product type, your first product, and a pH check with its critical limit already set. Nothing gets created until you confirm it, and you can edit or dismiss each card first (how the starter setup works). The starter product types loosely follow how FDA groups foods, and they're a starting point you can change. Product types are available on every plan.

Baked goods don't get a pH check, because they aren't an acidified food. Answer "Something else" and no cards are staged; you build product types and products under Settings and add CCPs from the template library.

02. Week one: run real batches

Create each batch as you start it. Open Production, click Create Batch, pick the product, set the date, and FourFoxes assigns the batch number.

Then link the ingredient purchases that went into it. On the batch's Edit page, scan the purchase's QR code, or search for the purchase by supplier, ingredient, or date. Batches save fine without links. An unlinked batch just shows up later as a gap in your recall trace.

Log CCP checks when they happen, from the batch's packaging screen or from Food Safety, then Monitoring. FourFoxes grades numeric readings against your critical limit, so an out-of-limit reading can't be marked as a pass, and a saved monitoring record can't be edited or deleted.

That permanence is why logging in the moment matters. Checks written up from memory at the end of a ten-hour day are how records drift away from what happened on the floor. We covered that gap in When the last shift didn't log it.

The Today dashboard keeps a getting-started checklist that ticks itself off from your records. Create a batch, package one, log a CCP check, and it reads "You're live."

Now invite whoever runs production. If the people on the floor won't use it, the records won't exist, and two weeks is the cheapest place to find that out.

03. Week two: try to break your own records

Pick a recent batch and click Trace back. FourFoxes walks the chain from the batch to each ingredient lot, the purchase it came from, and the supplier. Start from an ingredient purchase instead and Trace forward shows every batch that used it, then the packaged lots and shipments downstream.

Read the banner at the top first. It says whether the trace is complete or how many gaps it found, and it names each one in place: a batch with nothing linked, a supplier lot number nobody recorded, a batch not yet packaged. The trace still runs with gaps in it. The gaps mark what you can't prove (how a recall trace works).

A supplier calling about a bad lot will ask you exactly this: which batches used it? Every gap you find this week is a chore you fix now instead of during a recall.

04. Day 13: the walk-in, rehearsed

Inspectors usually want four things: monitoring logs for each CCP with corrective actions, calibration records, supplier and lot records, and proof you can trace. Many ask you to demonstrate a trace live.

In our own production, we show the inspector our records and ask if they'd like an export. Rules and processes differ by local jurisdiction, so find out what yours expects.

Run the rehearsal:

1. Open Food Safety, then HACCP Reports, then Open Master Log. Set the date range and click Generate Report to see it on screen.
2. Export it as PDF or CSV. You'll need the admin or owner role. Download links expire after 24 hours; the records don't.
3. Run one recall trace and export that too.
4. Open Food Safety, then Where limits came from. Check that every limit has a filing behind it and none is flagged as disagreeing. If a process authority letter set your limit, record it on the product type as a filed scheduled process.

One habit to keep after the trial: we generate our yearly batch and CCP reports and export them so they're ready to email, and we set the app to show the same values on screen. The master log covers a range of up to a year (how audit prep works).

When the inspector asks, you pull up the record and stay calm. That's the whole goal.

05. Day 14: decide with your records in hand

Three days before the trial ends, you get a reminder email and a banner in the app.

If you subscribe, pick Maker or Producer, monthly or annual, under Account Settings, then Billing & Subscription. Every plan includes every feature; they differ in limits. Maker covers 3 users and 30 batches a month. Producer covers 10 users and unlimited batches (compare plans).

If you don't, the account moves to the Free plan and nothing is deleted. The owner keeps access, and teammates' access pauses until you upgrade. Admins can download the whole account as a ZIP of CSV files whenever they want (security and your data).

So the trial costs you two weeks of attention. Your records stay either way.