Accounting software any recommendations?

Pheasant Surprise · Jan 8, 2018

Robert said:
Thanks. we are on Farmplan but desire something simpler and cheaper. Hoping it can accommodate and report on various diversified income streams, handle asset register and a lot of invoicing. Need to find out if that is all integral or whether it involves a lot of "add ons" and how seamless they are.

Asset register is integral in Xero, so you can run depreciation against your fixed assets. Once an invoice is approved, you have the ability to review each line item on the invoice (at some point you desire) and assign it to the appropriate asset class etc and assign it's own depreciation rate etc.

Diversified income streams into the same business are not problem either, as you can assign that income stream into its own account code. Very easy.

Robert · Jan 8, 2018

Sounds promising, thanks.

Robert · Jan 9, 2018

Robert said:
Sounds promising, thanks.

Thinking on.....how easily can it be used for budgeting purposes both p&l and cashflow, ideally into the medium term rather than just current financial year for example? Thanks

Boysground · Jan 9, 2018

I do a budget for the year. It is easily set up on xero, I have it so that each heading code is broken down monthly although some of them may not have a spend or income in any particular month. You can import from other software, I haven't tried that so not sure how it works. There is a wide selection of reports. I tend to compare the budget with the 3 and 6 month profit and loss. You can run more than 1 budget so I dont see that it would be a problem setting 1 up for a longer period of time.

Bg

Rob Holmes · Jan 9, 2018

Sum-it here, easy to use, Does accounting, arable, dairy, beef, etc management. Reasonable price and excellent technical support

https://www.sum-itsoftware.co.uk/

Clive · Jan 9, 2018

Robert said:
Thanks. we are on Farmplan but desire something simpler and cheaper. Hoping it can accommodate and report on various diversified income streams, handle asset register and a lot of invoicing. Need to find out if that is all integral or whether it involves a lot of "add ons" and how seamless they are.

having changed from Farmplan to xero several year back I would rather pull my own teeth than go back to using it

Dairyfarmerswife · Jan 9, 2018

Robert said:
Thinking on.....how easily can it be used for budgeting purposes both p&l and cashflow, ideally into the medium term rather than just current financial year for example? Thanks

Budgeting is easy as BG says. You can have different budgets for different scenarios too.

Cashflow less easy, as the budget only shows those items which appear in the P&L, so doesn't include any capital repayment, or private drawings for example. The best work around we have come up with for this is to add a dummy column into the expenses in the budget for drawings and repayments, so that we can forecast cashflow. Real transactions are never allocated against this column though. It's a bit of a pain and I wish they would allow cashflow forecasting. Xero's suggestion is to export historical figures from the cash summary to excel but we are very seasonal so that doesn't really work. There is a cashflow add on called float but it seemed more targeted at businesses forecasting income rather than expenditure and was pretty expensive too.

Boysground · Jan 9, 2018

Dairyfarmerswife said:
Budgeting is easy as BG says. You can have different budgets for different scenarios too.

Cashflow less easy, as the budget only shows those items which appear in the P&L, so doesn't include any capital repayment, or private drawings for example. The best work around we have come up with for this is to add a dummy column into the expenses in the budget for drawings and repayments, so that we can forecast cashflow. Real transactions are never allocated against this column though. It's a bit of a pain and I wish they would allow cashflow forecasting. Xero's suggestion is to export historical figures from the cash summary to excel but we are very seasonal so that doesn't really work. There is a cashflow add on called float but it seemed more targeted at businesses forecasting income rather than expenditure and was pretty expensive too.

That is a problem that I came up with, I am hoping that Xero do try and sort this in the future.

bg

Clive · Jan 9, 2018

Dairyfarmerswife said:
Budgeting is easy as BG says. You can have different budgets for different scenarios too.

Cashflow less easy, as the budget only shows those items which appear in the P&L, so doesn't include any capital repayment, or private drawings for example. The best work around we have come up with for this is to add a dummy column into the expenses in the budget for drawings and repayments, so that we can forecast cashflow. Real transactions are never allocated against this column though. It's a bit of a pain and I wish they would allow cashflow forecasting. Xero's suggestion is to export historical figures from the cash summary to excel but we are very seasonal so that doesn't really work. There is a cashflow add on called float but it seemed more targeted at businesses forecasting income rather than expenditure and was pretty expensive too.

we still use a excel spreadsheet for cashflow - I have been looking at figured add-on that is ag specific and seems to be good for cashflow and budgeting

not seen float before - will take a look

cashflow planning is the only criticism of xero I have

Boysground · Jan 9, 2018

Occasionally I need to issue a self billing invoice and Xero does not do these. It has to created on excel and imported like any other bill. Not a huge problem for me but it may be a pain for some.

Bg

Dairyfarmerswife · Jan 9, 2018

Clive said:
we still use a excel spreadsheet for cashflow - I have been looking at figured add-on that is ag specific and seems to be good for cashflow and budgeting

not seen float before - will take a look

cashflow planning is the only criticism of xero I have

I looked at figured but last time I checked it hadn't really been adapted to the UK ag sector. Figured was actually the thing that led us to Xero - in NZ it's linked to banks, feed merchants etc.

There's another add on developed in Ireland (I think!) called farmflo. I did have a trial on it but it wasn't quite right on the livestock side and I'm getting almost what I need on a free app for that so I wasn't about to change to a paid one! I think from memory there was some mapping and record keeping for agronomy too.

Clive · Jan 9, 2018

Dairyfarmerswife said:
I looked at figured but last time I checked it hadn't really been adapted to the UK ag sector. Figured was actually the thing that led us to Xero - in NZ it's linked to banks, feed merchants etc.

There's another add on developed in Ireland (I think!) called farmflo. I did have a trial on it but it wasn't quite right on the livestock side and I'm getting almost what I need on a free app for that so I wasn't about to change to a paid one! I think from memory there was some mapping and record keeping for agronomy too.

I have been speaking to the figured guys - they are going through a development stage to adapt it to uk farming, it’s very popular in NZ. So hopeful for it as a future solution maybe

neilo · Jan 13, 2018

Clive said:
I have been speaking to the figured guys - they are going through a development stage to adapt it to uk farming, it’s very popular in NZ. So hopeful for it as a future solution maybe

Weren’t you speaking with the Farmflo guys a while back too? Did anything ever come of that, as it looked an interesting concept a year or so back (but needed more work)?

Clive · Jan 13, 2018

neilo said:
Weren’t you speaking with the Farmflo guys a while back too? Did anything ever come of that, as it looked an interesting concept a year or so back (but needed more work)?

Yes I was (and still do). It’s good but still not a gatekeeper replacement yet imo

Feldspar · Jan 13, 2018

Clive said:
Yes I was (and still do). It’s good but still not a gatekeeper replacement yet imo

It's pretty frustrating that there seems to be no decent Gatekeeper replacement. We're still doing it on paper because I don't want to go to Gatekeeper and then switch, but there's only so long you can wait!

Clive · Jan 13, 2018

Feldspar said:
It's pretty frustrating that there seems to be no decent Gatekeeper replacement. We're still doing it on paper because I don't want to go to Gatekeeper and then switch, but there's only so long you can wait!

I agree, I’ve been talking to no end of companies about this including some very interesting as yet none uk systems I came across at agritechinca

I don’t think it will be too long before someone gets there with a decent, easy to use and comprehensive cloud offering at a reasonable subscription

Issue is the market is relatively small and development involved to do this well is expensive or I would have done it myself by now !

JeepJeep · Jan 13, 2018

QuickBooks I use for my business accounts... So far so good.

Clive · Jan 13, 2018

Feldspar said:
It's pretty frustrating that there seems to be no decent Gatekeeper replacement. We're still doing it on paper because I don't want to go to Gatekeeper and then switch, but there's only so long you can wait!

Ps - I had a play with Rhiza’s new software on Friday which is released very soon

Think you would be very impressed with the SAR imagery and what can be done with it including growth stage recognition from space, accurate yield prediction from as early as gs31 and N recommendation based on biomass models not just rate variation but absolute qty recommendations

The weather system was also pretty impressive and was modelling / recommending best application window based on historic, present and future data

But if a game changer imo and really looking forward to letting it make better decisions fir us this spring

You were right when you said this kind of thing wasn’t far away !

Feldspar · Jan 13, 2018

Clive said:
Ps - I had a play with Rhiza’s new software on Friday which is released very soon

Think you would be very impressed with the SAR imagery and what can be done with it including growth stage recognition from space, accurate yield prediction from as early as gs31 and N recommendation based on biomass models not just rate variation but absolute qty recommendations

The weather system was also pretty impressive and was modelling / recommending best application window based on historic, present and future data

But if a game changer imo and really looking forward to letting it make better decisions fir us this spring

You were right when you said this kind of thing wasn’t far away !

Hadn't heard anything about this, but sounds very much my cup of tea. Looking forward to being able to run the farm from the Bahamas.

Feldspar · Jan 13, 2018

Clive said:
Ps - I had a play with Rhiza’s new software on Friday which is released very soon

Think you would be very impressed with the SAR imagery and what can be done with it including growth stage recognition from space, accurate yield prediction from as early as gs31 and N recommendation based on biomass models not just rate variation but absolute qty recommendations

The weather system was also pretty impressive and was modelling / recommending best application window based on historic, present and future data

But if a game changer imo and really looking forward to letting it make better decisions fir us this spring

You were right when you said this kind of thing wasn’t far away !

Do you need your fields soil sampled and zoned for it to work?

Accounting software any recommendations?

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