The genesis for Figured came from two enterprising Kiwi farmer/accountants who believed there had to be a better way to provide farmers with visibility over the nancial performance of their businesses. Xero’s accounting software was gaining traction in the market and the two farmer/accountants set about designing a product that enabled farmers and their advisors to construct a comprehensive nancial plan for their farming operation. Connecting toXero, transactions update and refresh within the plan, providing a real-time helicopter view of how the farmingbusiness isperformingat any point in time, empowering farmers tomake informed decisions based on actual data. Eight years on and Figured has become New Zealand’s leading farm nance system, with a growing global presence. “We’re very well established in New Zealand, have a strong presence in Australia, a presence in the United Kingdom and a team on the ground in the US,” says John Gibson GMAustralia and New Zealand. “We’re very strong in dairy and livestock and we also have the ability to support cropping and horticulture.” The product has evolved from simply being a budgeting and planning product across a season to now having multi-year planning capability. “A farmer can model an annualised plan up to ten years. That helps them to understand the long-term plan and ambitions, expansions, diversi cation and succession. They can bring that back and work in the current season’s plan towards achieving those longer-term ambitions. For the accountants, we’ve just brought out a business intelligence solution, which enables ‘what-if’ scenarios to be run through the Figured system. We can create opportunities for the accountants and advisors to proactively reach out to their farmer network and advise what the impact might be and suggest a revision to the plan.” Figured believes Farmers should expect seamless integrated technology that’s just easy to use. As part of their mission they’re in partnership with FarmIQ and are working on an integration between the two systems. “We really like what FarmIQ are doing in the market and think there is a lot of synergy between the two companies. They’re the champions and market leaders when it comes to the physical and operational activities that happen on a farm— recording things like livestock movements, the application of fertiliser and health and safety. The piece that we’re really good at is nancial planning. The synergy is taking the physical information managed in FarmIQ and bringing the elements that have a nancial implication into Figured. The integration we’re developing with FarmIQ is taking all the livestock movement and seamlessly migrating that to Figured’s Livestock Tracker which is a reconciliation of all livestock on the property. We can take sales and purchases of livestock and nancially model that out within Figured. The problem we’re trying to solve for farmers is duplication of e ort.” Re ecting on Figured’s success over the last eight years, John says it is as simple as putting a product in the hands of a farmer that gives them an up to date and accurate view of the nancial performance of their farming business. “It’s empowering.” Two heads dare to dreambigger
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