06 July 2023

Summer Newsletter

We hope the sun is shining where you are and the longer summer days are proving fruitful for your farm. This edition is packed with results from our Farmer Insight Survey, 3 time-saving admin tips and how to get £50 off next year’s support!

Sur­vey Results: Farm Admin Has Increased For 74% of Farm­ers in Last 3 Years

Thank you to the 242 of you who com­plet­ed our Farmer Insights Sur­vey. The results are in. Here are some key highlights:

• 40% of you are ​‘wor­ried’ about the future of your farm, this is even high­er for arable farm­ers, sheep farm­ers and those over 45 years of age.
• You are not alone — near­ly 50% feel they do not ful­ly under­stand the legal require­ments of run­ning their farm with some admit­ting they don’t real­ly under­stand at all!
• Farm­ers are spend­ing more time on admin than ever before, with many spend­ing over 15hrs every week on farm admin duties alone.
• Near­ly a third of farm­ers won’t be invest­ing in future tech in the next 3 years (and we know why!)

Read Full Sur­vey Results Here

3 Total Short­cuts To Save Time In The Office

As our sur­vey revealed, most of you have seen an increase in farm admin in the past 3 years. We want to do all we can to help relieve some of this pressure. 

Here are just 3 lit­tle tips for using Total that can help save you that bit of valu­able time:

1. Stop Repeat­ing the Same Descrip­tions: save time on inputting com­mon invoice descrip­tions such as rev­enues with set prices by adding stan­dard descrip­tions to be auto­mat­i­cal­ly pop­u­lat­ed when you enter the first two characters.

How: In the Descrip­tion box on Input Invoice, tap the F2 key at the top of your key­board and set a new com­mon­ly used description.

Exam­ple: Add ​‘Mar­ket Com­mis­sion’ as a Stan­dard Descrip­tion so you only have to type ​‘ma’ then hit the enter key to auto-fill your invoice description.

2. View your Favourite Reports in One Click: Make it quick and easy to get up your most fre­quent­ly used reports.

How: Click View Reports — Click once (to high­light) on one of your fre­quent­ly used reports — update pre­ferred cri­te­ria to the right (e.g. time peri­od) — click ​‘Add to favourites’ in blue under­lined at the top right of the list.

Exam­ple: Every month you’d like to see your Cash­flow Bud­get. Once saved in the ​‘My Favourites’ fold­er on the left of View Reports, it can be eas­i­ly accessed.

3. Use F10 to Instant­ly Tag All Items in a List: No need to man­u­al­ly go through and tick or untick all the animals/​fields when treat­ing with med­i­cine, fer­tilis­er or any action for that mat­ter! This F10 short­cut can also be used if you wish to tick or untick mul­ti­ple lists in Field or Accounts.

How: when pre­sent­ed with a screen with a tick box list in Total, try using the F10 key at the top of your key­board to selec­t/un-select all items in the list. 

Exam­ple: In the Cat­tle Actions/​Usage screen, use the cri­te­ria to nar­row down your ani­mal list (if need­ed), click on one ani­mal eartag to high­light in yel­low, press the ​‘F10’ key to auto-tick all ani­mals on the list (to untick them all, sim­ply press F10 again). Now block treat them with your wormer, foot trim­ming etc. 

Do You Know Any Beef or Sheep Farm­ers Using Farmplan’s Live­stock Software?

You may have heard that Farm­plan are ​‘farm­ing out’ all their live­stock users (cat­tle and sheep) to Herd­watch.

Pass on our exclu­sive migra­tion offer (linked below) and we will knock £50 of your next sup­port bill if they start using Total.

We are aware that some live­stock farm­ers are not par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py about this change from Farm­plan to Herd­watch a vari­ety of reasons:

• Herd­watch is pri­mar­i­ly app-based which is dif­fi­cult for prop­er­ly analysing data
• It does not link with all weighers
• Its report­ing abil­i­ty on herd per­for­mance is limited
• There are high on-going annu­al fees
• It does not inte­grate with oth­er man­age­ment soft­ware, e.g accounts

SUM-IT’s Total Beef over­comes all these issues and more!

We are offer­ing all cur­rent users of Farmplan’s Cat­tle Man­ag­er a spe­cial migra­tion offer, so they’ll ben­e­fit as well as you!

If there any live­stock farm­ers you know who may be inter­est­ed, please let them know and if they pur­chase, your sup­port bill next year will be reduced! We have put togeth­er this handy leaflet for you to email or text to your friends/​family which high­lights our key ben­e­fits. Thank you for help­ing to spread the word. :-)

Down­load Spe­cial Offer For Live­stock Farmers

TOTAL2 — The Word In The Field!

We have got 10 amaz­ing farm­ers who are test­ing out our brand new TOTAL2 Accounts which has just been released. Our in-house devel­op­ment team are work­ing extreme­ly hard tweak­ing it based on their feed­back to ensure it does every­thing you require and more!

Here’s some ini­tial feedback:

“I love the new look of TOTAL2 and it is actu­al­ly eas­i­er to use than the orig­i­nal (didn’t think I would be say­ing that!)”

​“I real­ly like being able to cus­tomise the home screen and pin my most used actions & reports on there”

Fan­cy Help­ing Oth­er Farmers?

It is always so use­ful for oth­er farm­ers com­par­ing farm man­age­ment soft­ware to be able to read reviews from oth­er farm­ers. If you have a spare few min­utes, it would be huge­ly appre­ci­at­ed if you could leave a lit­tle review on Google for us.

Just click here to let peo­ple know what you like about Total!

We’d Love To Hear Your Story

In our next edi­tion, we’d love to share a mini case study from one of our farm­ers. If you’d like to be fea­tured in an upcom­ing edi­tion, please do get in touch or call us on 01844 213003 we’d love to hear from you!