Does the system understand how your commodities work?

A washed Ethiopian and a Brazilian natural are not the same product, even if they both say “green coffee” on the contract. The system should handle different origins, grades, and processing methods as distinct attributes that follow the trade from contract to settlement, not just as a text field someone fills in manually. If you work with cocoa, the distinction between bulk and bagged, or between origins from West Africa versus Ecuador, needs to be part of the system’s logic, not a workaround your team builds in Excel.

Ask the vendor to show you a live trade where the origin and grade affect the pricing and the quality control record. That demo will tell you more than any sales slide.

What contract types does it support natively?

Agricultural commodity contracts are not simple. You need a fixed price, a differential, and a price-to-be-fixed in the same system, properly tracked across the full lifecycle. If the platform handles fixed contracts cleanly but forces your team to improvise when a PTF contract comes in, you will feel it at closing time.

Futures and hedging tied directly to physical lots is another thing worth checking. Some systems manage physical trades in one module and futures in another, with a manual reconciliation step in between. That is the kind of thing that creates errors at month-end.

How does it handle quality control?

This is where a lot of generic CTRM platforms fall short, and where soft commodities are genuinely different. Pre-shipment samples, arrival samples, cupping results for coffee, grading for cocoa or nuts: those need to be linked to specific lots and contracts, not to a general record somewhere. If your quality team works in a separate spreadsheet and uploads results manually, the system is not doing its job.

A practical question to ask: can you see the quality record of a specific lot, tied to the contract it came in on, without leaving the platform?

Position and risk: does it update in real time?

Your position across physical and financial trades should be available when you need it, not after someone runs a report. If a consolidated position requires someone to export data and build a view in Excel, you are carrying unnecessary risk, especially on volatile days. The same applies to P&L at the contract level: estimated versus actual, with the real service charges pulled from the system, not from a two-week-old invoice sitting in someone’s inbox.