By Forsyth Thompson
Most practices know they should be offering farm advisory. Most also assume it means rebuilding how they work, so they wait for a quieter year. Here's why starting small gets you into the high-value work faster.
At this point, most ag accounting practices have probably discussed advisory at some point or another.
In our experience talking to partners around the world, often we see that the partners agree advisory is where the practice needs to go. But, then tax season arrives, the practice hits capacity, and the can is kicked down the road a bit further.
Not knowing where to start was voted the biggest barrier to offering more ag advisory by attendees of a recent Figured-sponsored webinar with Insightful Accountant. Not knowing how to price or package it came in second.
So let's talk about where that starting point is, and how to roll out advisory in a way that doesn't disrupt existing workflows.
1. Start With Five to 10 Clients
Pick five to 10 clients to start. That's enough to test the method on real operations, and small enough to run alongside your regular compliance work without getting in the way.
Look for clients where:
- A planning conversation is already happening.
- The client is engaged and responsive.
- The operation's complexity is typical of your book, so what you learn will be transferable to other clients.
- They have a real decision on the horizon that you can actively advise on.
New clients are often the easiest place to begin. They have no history with the practice and no price expectations to reset.
"There is no harm with trying to implement a service with only new clients. That is the perfect opportunity to do it," said Erin Arick, senior account executive at Figured, on a recent Insightful Accountant webinar.
"They don't have a history with you. They're not, 'Oh, why is my bill higher than it was last year?' And then you have to explain all the new services that you're providing for them, all the new reports."
Leave out, for now, any client whose data you can't easily get to. Sorting the rest of the book can come later.
2. Give It One Owner
Hand the pilot to one person inside the practice. In our experience, practices that get started this way usually have one champion who owns the change.
A named owner keeps the pilot moving when compliance deadlines pull everyone else away. Their job is to keep each client's plan on schedule, note what clients ask for, and track how long each plan takes. Those notes become the practice's method in step four.
3. Get the Data Right Before the First Budget
Every plan in the pilot rests on the numbers underneath it. When those numbers are incomplete or months out of date, a budget can look sound and still be wrong.
In a real example of this, Jarod Creed, owner of JC Ag Financial Services, found that, among his clients, many thought they knew their cost of production but were as much as 35% off.
So before you build a single budget, make sure each pilot client's records are complete and current. Every bank account and card should feed the accounting file, there should be enough history to show how money normally moves through the farm's year, and transactions should be reconciled soon after they clear.
Each practice settles on its own routine. At JC Ag, which supports more than 110 farms across the US, the team connects every bank account and credit card when a client comes on board, pulls 12 to 18 months of transaction history as a baseline, and reconciles each new transaction within 48 to 72 hours.
"If we don't have complete information, we're not making 100% accurate decisions," said Jeff Janssen, CFO at JC Ag.
Learn more: Scaling to 110+ US Farm Clients on Referrals Alone
Setting Up Your Pilot in Figured
Figured makes this a lot easier. It works with QuickBooks Online and Xero, syncing with your live actuals, and adds an agri layer on top. Live numbers flow between systems, and production activity is recorded dally alongside transaction, split by enterprise, so you can dig into the details.
Clients still on desktop? Moving farmers to the cloud is its own effort, but you're already trialing a small project - a great place to test it with a few clients who are eager to get more from their data.
Learn more about Figured, and how to get started:
4. Build the Standard as You Go
Five clients is a small start, but it helps you establish a standard and document everything so that future clients aren't building from scratch. As you work through this pilot, you'll want to standardize:
- How much planning each type of client needs, from a basic budget to a multi-year forecast.
- What data you need from clients, in what format, and by when.
- Report templates that work across similar client types.
- A written record of what worked, so the rest of the team can repeat it.
Once the data is all connected in Figured and your report templates are built in Reporting Studio, you have the foundation to expand to more clients.
"We had 10 to 15 different spreadsheets that we now can all do inside of Figured," said Ashly. "The moment I could get rid of those and create a process that was very much the same across the board for my team, to be able to do what I call rinse and repeat."
Learn more: Why You Shouldn't Offer Advisory to Every Client
From Here, Growth Isn't So Hard
Once the method works for five clients, roll it across the book in stages, starting with the clients most like your pilot group. Price it as an ongoing engagement built around the farm's year, so planning becomes part of the client's annual budget. Each new client then joins a process that already exists.
Want to drill into more detail? Our free Farm Planning and Budgeting Made Easy guide sets out the three levels of planning, from basic budgets to multi-year forecasts, and what each one needs and delivers. Inside, you'll also learn more about our QuickStart program, and how it supports your first clients as you expand.
