Dan Aberhart talks with Craig Macfie, a CPA, P.Ag. and founder of Spring CFO, about why so many farm owners make next year’s decisions on bookkeeping that is months behind. Craig, a fractional CFO who works alongside farm owners, walks through the building blocks of farm finance. They run from strategy and risk, through bookkeeping, reporting and forecasting, to the conversation with the bank. The tension is that the numbers lenders and advisors rely on are estimates, and they are often not current. The takeaway for people in agriculture is that strategy comes before growth, and the bookkeeping cannot be the thing that slips.
Your banker calls it coffee. In Craig Macfie's experience, it is an interview. They are reading your numbers, and they are reading how you manage.
Harvest ends, Christmas comes, and twelve months of bookkeeping land on the accountant's desk with everyone else's. Reports can arrive in April, just as the field work starts again. Next year's decisions are already underway while the picture of last year is still missing.
Dan Aberhart sits down with Craig, a CPA, P.Ag. and the founder of Spring CFO, who works alongside farm owners as their fractional CFO. A live poll of the room found only about a third had grain inventory and working capital numbers that were current and checked. Craig explains why the numbers are always an estimate, and what it takes to build the finance side of an operation on a solid base.
What's Inside
• Why a lender's "coffee" is really an interview, and what they read across the table
• Why grain inventory is always an estimate, and why the adjustment more often hurts next year's profitability than helps
• The building blocks of farm finance: strategy and risk first, then transactions, bookkeeping, reporting, forecasting and the bank
• How to get bookkeeping current when decisions are being made on information months old
• Cash flow lending versus asset-based lending, and the production reconciliation inside AgriStability
• How the Entrepreneurial Operating System gives a farm a simple structure for strategy, a scorecard and meetings
Resources Mentioned
• Traction (the book behind the Entrepreneurial Operating System)
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
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