21 May 2021

Keeping track of business performance is one of the keys to driving future business performance. Maintaining up-to-date, regular financial reports will help ensure you are able to make well-informed business decisions such as when to further capital expenditure and farm development, assessing where you can make cost reductions, or identifying under or well-performing business elements.

There are two important aspects to business planning – budgeting and cashflow forecasting. A budget is a plan for where you want your farming business to go over a period of time, usually twelve-months, whereas a cashflow forecast is an analysis, broken down month by month, of where income and expenses are expected based on what has happened in the past.

Budgeting

Budgeting is a tool that should be used as both a good planning exercise and as a benchmark to determine business success.

Budgets should be robust in their making, using actual data from prior periods as an initial starting point to determine cashflow.

Cashflow forecasting

Cashflow forecasting is essential to helping you keep on top of where your business is heading and what you need to do to get there.

Forecasting daily or weekly will help ensure you keep your finger on the pulse of day to day operations. It will also enable you to keep track of your tax payments to IRD so you don’t fall behind, help you continue to meet all your lending obligations and make it easier for any expenditure projects to be implemented and executed correctly.

Cloud accounting software

Implementing a cloud-based accounting software is the recommended way to manage budgeting and cashflow forecasting as it offers more functionality and reliability than traditional desktop systems, and provides a plethora of additional benefits which can help your business.

It enables you to access your financial data anytime from anywhere, and your data and records are all safely stored on a cloud sever so there is no software for you to download. It’s a matter of simply logging in and working from your web browser where ever you have Wi-Fi or an internet connection.

Simply put, budgeting and cashflow forecasting can help you have better control of your financial processes and using cloud accounting software to manage them will give you more time to focus on the business and make the money!

If you’d like any more information on budgeting and cashflow forecasting or if you need assistance selecting and implementing accounting software, please contact the Findex Accounting and Business Advisory team.