Improving Your Farms Cashflow
As a starting point, let’s talk about the importance of cashflow forecasting and preparing a cashflow budget.
Because without these, how do you know how your cashflow is going to look?
The first thing we do with our clients is to get an understanding of what is happening on the farm from a production perspective.
Cattle being sold, crops to be sold, wool, wheat, cotton, that sort of thing.
Based on the activities that are occurring on the farm and the likely prospect of selling, we can work out the income projections.
We can look at the costs associated with putting in pasture, preparing for cropping – fertilizer, seed, etc – and get a pretty good idea of how things are going to look from a cashflow perspective.
Projections
By looking at our projections, we can then find ways to improve the situation.
We can do this by making purchases at the appropriate time and potentially delaying purchases until the time that those inputs are required.
From an income perspective, we can then look at what can we do in terms of bringing cashflow forward.
Some farmers are using on-farm grain storage to improve the cashflow overall.
Whilst we may not be getting the money in at harvest, we are in a position where we can market the grain post-harvest and hopefully get a better outcome when it comes to the income side of our cash flow situation.
There are plenty of strategies that you can think of when it comes to improving your cashflow. It is more a matter of time.
By that, I mean making the time to step outside of the day-to-day running of your farm and contemplate what can be done.
Our 5 Top Tips for Improving your Cashflow
- Set aside time to work on your cashflow
- Get your Adviser on board
- Understand your costs
- Think outside the box. How can you ensure your farm is at its most productive and efficient?
- Look at what tools you can use to make managing your cashflow easier.
Some of our farming clients are using Figured, which is a tool that farmers use in conjunction with Xero. There is also Phoenix, Cashbook Plus, Agrimaster, P2P Agri and other products out there that can be used to assist with cashflow.
If you have any questions or you want to share the ways that you Improve the cashflow on your farm, we want to hear from you!
Let’s start a conversation.
Cheers,
Matt.
