Discover how smarter tools and technology can simplify farm accounting, giving you more time to focus on what really matters.
If you’ve been relying on the same accounting software for an extended period, it’s time to reassess its suitability for your evolving business needs. This blog delves into the reasons why reviewing your farm accounting software regularly, especially at year-end, can be a game-changer for rural businesses.
Maintaining accurate financial records is crucial, not just to avoid penalties from missed HMRC deadlines, but also to gain valuable insights into your farm’s financial health. If farm bookkeeping feels like a tedious task, you have options. You could hire a professional bookkeeper—organisations like the Institute of Agricultural Secretaries and Administrators are a great resource. Alternatively, using farm bookkeeping software can optimise your workflow and make managing finances more efficient.
Since HMRC introduced Making Tax Digital for VAT, many businesses have found VAT submissions to be faster and more streamlined thanks to digital tools. Now that technology is integral to the bookkeeping process, it’s worth asking: are you fully leveraging the available tools to save time and make your financial management smoother?
Batch payments
Most of us have now moved from writing cheques to making electronic payments. We say ‘most’ because we know that some of you are still tediously writing out cheques at the end of each month! Even making online payments can be time-consuming. Have you considered making batch electronic payments to suppliers? With all the invoices correctly loaded into your software you can send a single payment instruction to your bank to pay your suppliers. Not multiple repetitive entries in both your banking application and farm accounting software. This is a huge time saver.
Bank feeds
Whilst we are thinking about banking, have you considered bank feeds which are now readily available? No need for paper statements, and no need for you or your farm bookkeeper to routinely login to your banking application to reconcile your bank. This can also speed up routine data entry.
Automating data entry
For the more adventurous of you there is data capture using Optical Character Recognition or OCR. Invoices can be scanned, photographed, and uploaded or simply emailed to an OCR platform (like Dext) where automated allocations of supplier, account code, VAT and analysis can be done. Simply import these transactions into your farm accounting software. You have a link to the scanned image of the invoice also. It is always helpful for your accountant to have instant access to an image of the invoice. It saves your accountant time and you, money.
Budgeting for success
We’ve talked about inputting data, but what about budgets? Having reduced time spent on routine bookkeeping you can spend more time on creating and importing budgets into your farm accounting software. This will enable you to view your budget vs. actual reports at the click of a mouse, whether cashflow or profit and loss, whether at whole business level or enterprise level for those all-important management decisions. How well are your various enterprise activities performing? Easily analyse this with an enterprise profit comparison report.
So, focus more of your office time on the productive side of record keeping assisting in decision-making, and less on day-to-day routines.
If you’d like to know more about anything mentioned in this article, talk to our team.
