Farm Focus

Harvesting the power of payment automation

Farm Focus provides specialist financial software for farming businesses across New Zealand and Australia. Its 8,500 customers include hobbyists, husband-and-wife teams, family trusts and corporates.

“We run the cashbook and budgeting for farmers, helping them to organise and automate day-to-day cashflow management and forecasting,” said Greg Senior, Business Operations Manager, Farm Focus. “We've been around since 1981 and recently evolved to become a 100% SaaS-based web application.”

That evolution also saw Farm Focus switch to a subscription charging model, and it turned to GoCardless integrated with Maxio to automate billing and subscription management. In the process its billing has become more accurate, it has slashed headcount in accounts receivable, and brought down its total cost of payments.

Manually processing thousands of payments a month

Farm Focus used to manage payments and subscriptions through its ERP system, outputting invoices and waiting for customers to pay them by bank transfer. This process was error-prone and created a demanding manual workload.

“We had to manually click buttons thousands of times to invoice customers, then match the payments to those invoices, before manually clicking ‘paid’ thousands more times,” said Greg. “A lack of integration between our systems meant the ERP data was often out of sync with customers’ actual product usage, so it was easy to invoice the wrong amounts.”

That then created more manual work for the accounts payable team, who had to try to figure who’d paid what, and when – and who hadn’t paid at all. Then they had to manually follow up with customers over email and phone, and manually keep track of their progress. “We had two-and-a-half FTEs just managing accounts receivable,” said Greg.

From 2.5 FTEs in accounts receivable, to less than one

Re-engineering its software for the cloud was also an opportunity for Farm Focus to throw out these manual processes in favour of an automated registration, purchase and billing workflow, built around GoCardless and Maxio.

“We have total visibility into failed payments, and can trigger a series of communications to customers to get them back up to date. Thanks to automations like this we’ve replaced our accounts receivable team with one financial specialist who spends less than a quarter of their time on accounts receivable.” Greg estimates that greater overall efficiency has dramatically brought down the overall total cost of payments for Farm Focus.

Customers prefer Direct Debit

Most of Farm Focus’ customers already pay by GoCardless and this proportion is growing all the time.

“We give users the choice between GoCardless and credit card and they’re voting with their feet – around two-thirds of customers choose GoCardless and that’s growing all the time,” said Greg. “Direct Debit has lots of business-friendly features. They know they’re fully protected in the case of disputes, and they avoid the risk of racking up interest on their credit card. It also shows up clearly in their automated bank feeds in our platform, and those found in other accounting software, so it saves them a bit of manual work categorising and reconciling transactions.” 

Growing adoption of Direct Debit is welcomed by Greg because bank payments with GoCardless are less likely to fail.

“Credit cards fail more often because they expire or the credit limits are far lower than a farmer’s overdraft facility,” he said. “But businesses pretty much never change their bank account.”

$4,800 saved on transaction fees

The flexibility of GoCardless’ contract terms helps Farm Focus manage the growth of its SaaS business, allowing it to optimise costs as transaction volumes increase.

“We started on a pay as you go basis but switched to a contract as our volumes grew,” said Greg. “In stark contrast to our card provider – who we never, ever hear from – GoCardless have always been proactive in helping us optimise our costs. We have regular deep dives on the payment trends they’re seeing in our data, which recently saved us $4,800 a year by matching our usage to the right tariff.”

Payments of the future

Next up for Farm Focus is pursuing its global ambitions and getting ahead on emerging open banking opportunities. Greg believes that, in GoCardless, it has a payments partner that can grow with it, anywhere in the world.

“GoCardless’s global presence means we can replicate, scale and integrate our payment processes as we enter new markets further afield, in Europe and even China,” he said. “They’re also helping us keep up with the latest innovations. E-invoicing, for example, could make our software’s automation more effective generally, and we’re working with our GoCardless Customer Success manager to develop ideas around beta testing this in Australia. PayTo should also speed up payment timings and help us get our money a lot quicker. That’s just some of the ways GoCardless will continue to add value for us.”