Free Guide For Accountants and Agri Advisers

Succession Planning as an Agri-Accountant

Farm succession is about to arrive across your whole client book. Half of Australia's farm owners expect to retire within a decade, and only 18% of farming families have a legally binding plan. This guide covers how to run those conversations on live farm data and modelled scenarios instead of spreadsheets.

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The numbers

Half Your Farm Clients Are Heading for the Same Conversation

Most of them have nothing in writing.

50% of Australian farm owners expect to retire within a decade

18% of Australian farming families have a legally binding succession plan

Why now

This Is Not One Client at a Time

More than 99% of Australia's agricultural businesses are family owned and operated, which means this is not a handful of isolated cases working their way through your client list one by one. It is a structural shift moving through the whole industry at once, and it is coming whether or not a plan is already in place.

Most farming families know the conversation needs to start. They are hesitant to begin it, and they are looking for someone who understands the process and can make a very large job feel like something they can start on.

Cheney Suthers Lawyers, From Crisis to Clarity (April 2025)

The complication

The Runway Is Shorter than It Looks

Succession conversations can take years, sometimes the better part of a decade. For the half of farm owners expecting to retire inside that window, the timeline is already tight. Tax reform narrows it further.

From1 July 2027

The 50% CGT discount is abolished for individuals, partnerships and trusts.

Proposed from1 July 2028

A 30% minimum tax on discretionary trusts, with a carve-out for primary production income that may not extend to the related land-holding arrangements a lot of farms actually use.

Window closes30 June 2030

The proposed three-year rollover window for restructuring out of a discretionary trust into a company or fixed trust.

A client weighing any of those decisions needs to see what the numbers do well before a window closes. That is difficult to model in a spreadsheet, and worse to model in one nobody fully trusts.

Inside the guide

What You Will Get

Where the retirement wave and the tax reform timeline collide, and what that means for when conversations need to start
Why spreadsheets break down in succession work specifically: fragility, version control, and the number of people who need the same live view at the same time
How to establish a baseline, so you know what the farm looks like in five or ten years if nothing changes
How to quantify the cost of delay by running the same transition starting now and starting in two years, side by side
How to compare handover pathways: staged transfer, immediate handover, or the retiring generation staying on wages
What a move between a trust, a company or a partnership does to the numbers, modelled ahead of any window closing

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Who this is for

Written for the People in the Room

Agri-accountants whose client base is largely family-owned farm businesses
Farm consultants and agri-advisers who sit in planning conversations without owning the compliance work
Firms where succession comes up regularly but rarely progresses past the first conversation
Anyone currently modelling succession in spreadsheets who is finding the collaboration harder than the maths

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We use Figured as a tool to plan around cash flow requirements or off-farm investments so that clients can achieve their goals through succession and generational change. Figured's scenario planning tool enables us to identify the needs and wants of three sets of generations in the family business.

Mark Edwards Director, Murray Nankivell

Your Clients Are Going to Ask What Happens Next. This Is How You Answer with Numbers

Download the guide to see how Australian accountants and agri-advisers are running succession conversations on live farm data, with every scenario modelled before a decision gets made.

Download the Guide