North Otago sharemilkers Hayden and Robyn Williams have a clear vision of what they want their life to look like in 10 years time.
That 10-year end point is set like a way-point on a map. They know where they are and where they’re going but to keep an eye on how they’re tracking they keep a close watch on the financial indicators.
DairyBase is one of the tools they’ve used over the past six seasons as 50:50 sharemilkers.
“DairyBase can help determine where you are now – how far you’ve come and how far you have to go on your journey,” Kathryn says.
It’s also been a great tool for Robyn and Hayden as they’ve worked on budgets and plans for their conversion.
“We want to run that farm as a much lower input operation so we’ve been able to go on to DairyBase and look at farms that have their information available for people to see – the Lincoln University Dairy Farm is there for instance and one of the Donkers’ farms,” Robyn says.
The level of detail necessary for that planning work and preparing information for the bank is there in their reports, she says.
Their debt to asset ratio is something they’ve monitored closely over the past six years and DairyBase can graph that to give an “at a glance” view of how it’s tracking.
“Again it’s the trends we’ve been interested in and we’ve seen it tracking down as we’ve reduced debt initially as part of the wealth creation plan. Then of course it’s gone back up recently as we’ve bought the farm and started going through the conversion process,” Robyn says.
Another report – the equity growth report – can tell them how much of their business growth has come from profit compared with capital gains.
In their instance they’ve generated more than $1m over a three-year period from profit driven out of the business as they’ve tightly controlled costs and been savvy about their stock sales.
“What DairyBase can give you is information – information that puts you back in the driving seat and lets you know exactly where you are on your journey,” Kathryn says.
