When you create your farm business in Farm Focus, a working plan is automatically created for the current financial year, including any Actuals to date, plus your Planned items for the year ahead.
If a bank balance is recorded in Settings - Bank accounts, with a start date earlier than the current financial year, a section called ‘year Actuals’ will be created.
This is called the Working Plan due to it being a live and working document that is automatically revised up to date as the year progresses. You can name each of your plans to personalize them, and this name will be visible on the Working Plan Landing page below the corresponding plan. This name will move with the Plan whether you make it a Draft or a Baseline, or move it into another financial year.
The Landing Page view:
Your working plan is set as a continuum along the top from one year to the next with your Actuals to date and your Plan going forward. You can view the name of each plan, the description, and also who created the Plan with a date to help keep track of multiple users.
The baseline plans are set below the Working Plan and are a locked, read-only version of the working plan at any given point in time you choose.
The Draft plans are all list below in alphabetical order. You can use the arrow to drop down each draft to view the name, description and user detail.
Working Plan in the current year
Your working plan for the current financial year will display actual transactions up to revision date and planned transactions for the remainder of the year.
This view will change month by month as actual transactions come into your farm business from bank feeds, and manually imported bank transactions in the Actuals screen.
The following areas may change as a result of your actual transactions replacing planned transactions for the same period, especially when there are timing or production differences.
Monthly bank balances
Livestock tallies
Milk production
Monthly revision and re-forecasting help you to easily identify these differences and update your plan to accommodate them.
Get to know your icons in the Working Plan
Print: click this icon to print the Working Plan or create a PDF to save. Only the lines that are populated with information will print.
Compare Data: click this icon to show a comparison on Line 2 in your Working Plan
Quantites will show all of your quantities on Line 2. This includes things like stock numbers, milk solid kgs, litres of drench or hectares cultivated etc. Any quantity information you have coded in your actuals or forecast in your plan will show in Line 2.
The Actuals option will allow you to select the Actuals from a previous financial year to populate Line 2. This is handy for when you are building your budget for the new year; you can populate the second line with your previous information to give you a guide.
The Plan option allows you to select any other plan to go in Line 2. This could be a baseline plan you have previously saved to compare the monthly variances from your initial plan or use a draft plan to view the seasonal changes of your current system with a different scenario.
Viewing Options: click this icon to see the viewing options available.
The Accrual View option will flag with blue any cells that have payments relating to a previous financial year, such as deferred fertiliser payments, or your Accounts Payable at the end of the previous Financial Year. This option will also add in an additional column called "Future FY" which will show any items which are invoiced in the current year but will be paid in a future financial year. The Accrual view will also report all of your items as per the invoice or event date rather than the cash payment date. Read more here.
The other viewing options relate to livestock and you can read more about them here.
Keyboard shortcuts: click this icon to view a few handy keyboard shortcuts if you prefer to use your keyboard when entering information into your Working Plan.
Settings: click this icon to change the name of your plan, amend the opening livestock numbers or add in Opening GST.
The tick icon means that your latest changes in the working plan are saved and up to date.
Copy Line 2 in your Working Plan
When you choose to have your data compared on line 2 in the Working Plan, you can view any of your past actuals, or any draft or baseline plans. Some of these plans might have information which is relevant to copy into your planning area of your current Working Plan.
You can choose to copy this information from line 2 to override the existing information in your Working Plan.
When you click into the cashflow grid you will see the options you have available. As long as you have the Compare Data option active, then Copy line 2 will be available to select. You can choose to copy an entire category or at the extended code level, and also choose to copy livestock events.
You can still use the Copy Line 2 option when you are in Accrual View.
Working plan in a future dated year
Your working plan for a future dated financial year such as 2021/22 will display only planned items for the entire year. Actual transactions won't play a part in your plan until that financial year actually starts i.e. from 1st July 2021.
Need more info?
Click here to learn more about the Dairy Forecaster in the Working Plan.
Click here to learn more about the Livestock tab of your Working Plan.
Click here to learn about up-to-date revision in your Working Plan.