Dairy women talk finance

Run by the Dairy Women's Network, the Dairy Days workshops have been developed to provide dairying women with the skills and knowledge to create a budget and cashflow, review their cash situation, and be able to benchmark their business against others. Plus, a new, advanced training module will provide women with higher level financial planning skills.

Dairy Women's Network chief executive Sarah Speight says around 1000 women have already been trained on a lot of the financial basics at similar series of Dairy Days in the past two years.

"DairyNZ has, again, provided funding for our autumn 2012 Dairy Days and we will use those funds to run the same workshops in new locations around the country in February, March and April," she says.

"Plus we've developed a new, advanced financial planning workshop for women who've already gone through our first round of training."

The financial planning Dairy Days consist of practical, interactive sessions that provide information about how to make the best financial decisions for dairy farming businesses.

There are three workshops running at the autumn Dairy Days catering for women at all levels. "The Organised Office" covers office systems, basic farm accounts and personal finance.

In the "Cashbook to Cashflow" seminars, participants are taught how to: calculate farm income from production data, deal with major categories of expenditure, calculate forecasted income, and estimate forecasted expenditure.

The new, advanced "Essential Farm Finance" seminars will teach participants how to use farm budget data to help with decision making. A large part of the day will be spent using budget data to look at a proposal to buy more land or look at a bigger sharemilking job. Benchmarking will also be looked at in detail as a tool to look at business performance.

"By attending a Dairy Day in their region, women will realise they already have all the information they need to adequately plan for the financial health of their farming businesses, even if they do not spend every day on the farm," says Speight.

"At most, women often just need a few pointers on how and where to collate the information.

"Financial management continues to be an area of farm businesses where women can add significant value. And through these workshops, they'll be empowered to make a real difference in their operations," she says.

For a complete schedule of the Dairy Days visit www.dwn.co.nz.