Cloud a big get-together for accounting, management

That figure would be lower for dairy and higher for sheep and beef, says Richmond. However it compares poorly to other sectors: ask a room full of tradees and the big majority would have financial management software, says Richmond.

But the advantage of the latest ‘seismic shift’ in information technology – the cloud – means Xero has been able to develop for farmers an online platform which enables farmers, accountants and farm professionals all to access the same information. “They can all easily access them and work together with the same set of online, realtime data on the farm budgeting, accounting, tracking and forecasting…. They don’t have to send data to different places. 

“It provides one centralised home for key accounting and farm management tools.”

Key to the solution is a growing ‘ecosystem’ of farming software partners fully integrated with Xero’s online platform.

MyFarm has been an early adopter of Farming in the Cloud and a pilot scheme has been run among 60 farming accountants. Xero is now taking a roadshow to accountants and other rural professionals to make sure all are up to speed when the system is officially launched at a prime spot at Fieldays.

Xero has worked with farming software partner Figured to develop the farming specific tools.

Figured project director Duncan Anderson says Figured started to develop systems for farmers who were also practising accountants and a farm adviser working for MyFarm.

They had to report each quarter on the performance of an equity partnership and these reports had to be accurate and consistent with the farm plan. The quarterly reports needed livestock and profit information. “The MyFarm group found that traditional tools couldn’t do that so they had to change their game.” Figured has now worked with Xero to develop the farm management tools for Farming in the Cloud.

Richmond says they worked with banks, accountants, farmers and farm consultants to develop the system and talked to industry players such as Federated Farmers. 

“Those guys came up with the need for one true live platform that everyone has access to. If the farmer has the subscription he makes the decision as to he invites in: he can invite in his bank manager or his accountant.

“That seamless accessibility hasn’t been there.  We have made it what we call ‘beautiful software’, it is so easy to check you information is up to date. You can have forecasts on a daily basis and year-to-date forecast. That ease of aspect hasn’t been there.”

Anderson says other software solutions are doing parts of this but no one else has translated all that physical farm culture into an up-to-date view of cash and profit and balance sheet in real time. 

Richmond says the next exciting thing is that the cloud is available anywhere anytime on any device. “We can then look at the likes of FarmIQ or LIC with on-farm software and apps; we can automate the next piece of the process.

“For example if you have a piece of software predicting how much you spend on fertiliser you can then go into your budgeting software; in the cloud you can get them to talk and connect. That’s what we see as the next exciting phase of building out the whole farm ecosystem in the cloud so that we link on farm and financial management.”

Anderson says they are discussing with DairyBase the potential to generate realtime benchmarking information. They have the ability to express the performance of the farm in farm production terms such as $/kgMS per cow and per hectare. 

They are talking with DairyBase about expanding that report out to some of the measurements used in Dairybase benchmarking.