Why Traditional Accounting Tools Fail US Farm Clients | Figured

In today’s highly volatile markets, US farmers are struggling to thrive without better, faster advice. But traditional accounting tools aren’t up to the task—agriculture is just too complex. So what are accountants and ag advisors turning to instead?

Let’s think about accounting tools for a second—and what they can or can’t do.

Traditional tools—like spreadsheets—have handled the fundamentals for decades. Transactions, reconciliation, year-end financial statements, tax returns … they’re trusted tools that do what they do well, and there’s a reason they’re still highly popular across America.

But what can’t they do? Here, in today’s climate, we see a problem:

• Scale: As they grow, spreadsheets start to lag, break, or become so complex no one knows how they work anymore. Plus, good templates take so long to set up that it’s painful to scale quality across your entire client base.
• Collaborate: We all know the classics—someone’s working on a different version of a critical document, the bank wants a file in their own format, or someone else hasn’t used the right template. These are barriers to smooth collaboration.
• Ag: These tools just aren't built for agriculture. Farming is too different, too variable, too volatile for systems designed for stable, predictable enterprises. It's a major limiting factor for farm accounting firms.
• Real-time visibility: Traditional accounting tools look backward. You can create highly detailed reports about what happened, but you’ll struggle to check what's happening right now—or look ahead to see what's coming next. Not without months of effort.

It’s in those gaps where modern US farmers are missing out on what they need, and their advisors are missing a real opportunity to drive revenue and reputation growth.

In Numbers: Why Farmers Need Their Advisors to Evolve

For American farmers, better financial advisory isn’t a want—it’s a need.

This is the toughest environment farmers have faced in a decade. Interest expenses are up 6%, input costs are up 30-50%, corn and soybean prices are down as much as 20%. Weather-related losses are hitting the billions, and that’s still only the start (source).

To make things harder, banks are walking back on agribusiness loans. They’re cutting their offerings, and major institutes like CoBank have outright stated they anticipate more farm loans to fail (Reuters).

“We just had one of the largest commodity price run-ups in years,” said Jonathon Haralson, co-founder of Texas-based advisory firm Empire Ag in a recent Figured webinar. “Usually input prices lag behind the rise, so farmers catch extreme profitability. This time they went synonymous.”

“When you look at the balance sheets, a lot of farmers made less money during this peak than in years before.”

But despite the difficulties, plenty of farmers are still finding ways to thrive—those who’ve got someone looking ahead for them. That’s where you, and your tools, come in.

Learn more: Making Scenario Modelling Easy in Figured

How Better Tools Benefit Both Farmers and Their Advisors

Jonathon and Empire Ag co-founder Holly Haralson take a modern approach to farm accounting. They utilize the latest tools (like QuickBooks Online combined with Figured) to gain greater visibility over their clients’ numbers, improve that real-time access to data, and provide a better, faster advisory service.

For their clients, it’s made a million-dollar difference.

→ Jonathon explained to us how, for one farmer, his team discovered $1.8 million in underestimated asset value that took the client from being labelled a ‘distressed loan’ by the bank to getting a new finance deal done in just 7 days.

→ For another, the team spotted that their client was calculating his breakeven costs incorrectly—he had overlooked around $1.15 per bu in indirect costs, which totally changed his marketing strategy.

→ For a third client, they successfully negotiated a $1.2 million succession plan using live farm data plus detailed scenario modelling—getting a young man his dream farm.

These farmers are succeeding—profiting—even when their peers struggle because better tools create a more adaptive advisory service, and more adaptive advice helps them stay ahead of market changes.

Business Growth for Accountants and Ag Advisors

Think about the impact a more valuable service could have on a firm like yours.

There’s no marketing half as strong as prosperous clients. The simple act of doing well when your neighbors aren’t makes people talk.

Real Outcomes for Advisors:

• Empire Ag went from needing 1-2 months to pull together client data to having it "instantaneously". Now they’re the firm you call when you want advice now, not in 2 months when the opportunity has passed by. This reputation has helped them grow to operate in four time zones, with over 125,000 acres on their books.
• Another US advisory firm—Precision Advising, run by Ashly Lindberg—has grown 20x in five years.
• Figured/Xero survey data has shown that accounting firms moving from compliance-only to advisory see revenue uplift of up to 327%. Additionally, their value perception among farmers (those indicating their accountant is ‘really valuable’) jumps from 23% to 83%.

This isn’t small stuff. It’s genuine business value. Profit is the number-one problem facing American farmers this year (AgriWebb 2025)—the accountants and advisors solving this problem are the ones who are winning.

So if Traditional Tools Don’t Cut It—What’s the Alternative?

We’ve already hinted at the solution here—Empire Ag uses it. It’s ag-specific software. Built by ag accountants for ag accountants and advisors.

For Empire Ag, that’s Figured: the world’s #1 ag accounting platform, in use by over 35,000 farms across the globe.

"I can almost remember to the day when we discovered Figured,” said Holly Haralson, Empire Ag co-owner with Jonathon. “It was like, oh my gosh, this is it. And it's just been so nice to get off the spreadsheets, get off the pen and paper, get off the napkins, and actually be able to put some useful tools and information out there that you rely on and that you have confidence in."

How it Works

Figured brings in the farm-specific production data that QuickBooks Online—Empire Ag’s chosen accounting tool—can’t track.

With the two combined, one pulling bank data, the other reflecting what’s really happening on the farm, Jonathon and Holly (and their clients) gain a ton of options for scalable, efficient advisory. They can…

• Track production (planted acres, harvested bushels, sold inventory) across specific fields and compare per-acre expenses.
• Generate crop season summary reports at the click of a button—revenue, costs, gross margin, profit per acre, cost per unit.
• Pull together variance reports to monitor actuals vs. budget throughout the year.
• Rapidly put together new budgets (in just minutes).
• Build rolling forecasts and multi-scenario models.
• And more.

“Compared to where we started 5 years ago,” explained Jonathon, “we had a lot of spreadsheets and we had a lot of data, and you would ask for information from clients but it might take a month or 2 months to gather this stuff up. Whereas now, it’s instantaneous.”

“I’ve had some calls with farmer clients,” added Holly, “and we have the opportunity right then to look and adjust. If we make a change over on the QuickBooks side, we can come back to Figured and just re-sync our data and then we’ve got it.”

“It’s immediately available for us to do the next thing that we’re onto in Figured.”

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