New Zealand-based ag tech company Figured wants to build upon your current farm accounting software to help you make real-time decisions.
“We want to bring the production data and information, like livestock being sold or bushels being harvested, and marry it with the financial information you already already have,” says Mitchell Parks, Figured U.S. account executive. “It creates color and insight into what’s happening on the farm so that you can make those smarter financial business decisions.”
During an episode of the Top Producer podcast, Parks and his colleague Erin Arick joined host Paul Neiffer to share how farmers can get an enhanced look at their finances through the Figured software.
Neiffer uses this analogy to describe the technology.
“With accounting software, like Xero or Quickbooks, you’re looking in the rearview mirror at historical data. Figured is designed to allow you to look through the windshield, so to speak. You’re able to use it as a management tool,” he explains.
Some of the ways you can use the software as a management tool include:
- To create farm budgets
- To calculate break-evens and profitability
- To model long-term “what if” scenarios using different options
“You’re going to be looking at all the transactions that come through the accounting platform, and you can create profit centers to bucket those transactions where they happened on the farm. So, you can track profitability for different aspects,” Arick says.
It’s important to note Figured must be used with Quickbooks Online, not the desktop version. Other integrations are likely on the horizon as well.
“We are exploring integrations with a couple of the major producer tracking tools,” Parks says. “I’m sure we’ve all had instances where there’s been a spreadsheet with a bit of data written, and then we’ve emailed it across a couple of people, and by the time it’s come back to you, it’s not the same spreadsheet. How can we remove that from the equation? I think we can do that really well and know that we can trust that data and trust that everyone is on the same page when it comes to those financials.”
If you want to test out Figured without adding all of your farm information, the company has a U.S. demo farm that can be accessed on its website using a free login.
“It’s like a sandbox,” Arick says. “You can mess around in there to see what the outputs are and create trackers. It’s just not connected to a live QuickBooks Online file, but if you would wish to do that, you can create a trial and connect it to your QuickBooks Online or Xero file.”
