Managing Farm Debt – Budgeting, Forecasting & Planning

If you’re feeling uncertain about your next year of farming, you’re not alone. Farmer confidence is low, with more than 11% of respondents to a Federated Farmers survey expecting profit to drop over the next year.

How you handle cash flow is important to suppliers and lenders, so even if you have a great accountant (like us), make sure you personally have a grasp on your finances.

DairyNZ has handy budgeting tools to take some of the head scratching out of the equation. It provides templates and guides you can print and work through, including:

• The Contract Milker Premium Calculator, comparing the profitability of contract milking with managing a farm
• The Variable Order Sharemilking Calculator, giving an overview of income and expenditure you can expect in your first year
• The Herd-owning Job or Sharemilking Calculator, helping you understand how much money you’ll need and how you can fund a herd-owning job
• A sensitivity table helping you assess risk from changes in pay out, production, and farm working expenses.

ASB Bank suggests one of our favourites a cloud-based budget system called Figured that works with Xero. Figured is an online farm management tool that assists with budgeting and forecasting, scenario planning and reporting with real-time data. We recognised very early that Figured on farming would be a natural fit with our Xero platform to enable real-time accurate management reporting for farmers.

We can go through your farm position and talk about different options to help you and your agribusiness succeed this season.

Talk to us today.