Farmers Cannot Do It All. Here are the Keys to Saving Time
When starting a Farm business, every minute of the day is taken up by a mountain of tasks. With limited resources (and time), efficiency is key when your goal is to grow operations and manage the business effectively.
Managing orders gets more complicated as your buyer list begins to grow. A simple spreadsheet might be a familiar starting point to manage orders on a small scale. However, maintaining a spreadsheet at scale can take hours of time as you acquire more customers and the probability of making errors increases. Even with dozens of orders, packing boxes and tracking itemized products on a spreadsheet can take hours to manage! Note, the average Farm “order” takes 7+ touches per customer to complete manually (via email, phone, and SMS) - not including the time it takes to update a spreadsheet and collect payments.
Farmers are one of the hardest-working groups of individuals, but they can’t do it all. When building a successful business, tending to the land, animals, and soil, your time increasingly becomes one of your most precious assets (not to mention time off with your family and friends). As your Farm grows, business operations can become more time-consuming, limiting your availability to complete work on the Farm. Farmers can avoid “death by 1,000 papercuts” by streamlining their business operations online while simultaneously serving their own needs and delighting buyers.
So what can Farmers do? Simplify the management of your Farm operations and focus on automating processes that can be done by business tools (using software to complete routine tasks). Here are the tactics implemented by top-performing Farmers to save time every day with proper business management:
Simplify Order Management
American adults regularly shop online and are comfortable making a purchase decision without trading emails, texts, or phone calls. (Note that Amazon alone had $468B in online sales during 2021). Reduce the noise and eliminate the interruptions during meals by directing all your Farm buyers to purchase online. Customer details, payments, and delivery preferences can be completed with the click-of-a-button while also automatically updating your inventory and collecting payments. Barn2Door makes it easy for 1000’s of Farmers to simply order management and get paid faster.
Sending the Right Emails
As more people join your contact list, it’s essential to automate email communications and analyze performance – open rates, click rates, and conversion rates. Namely, how much revenue did you earn from a single email?
Automated email campaigns are an essential tool to engage buyers, grow your business and drive Farm sales. Farmers use the Barn2Door + Mailchimp integration to stay top of mind with new and existing buyers. With Barn2Door, automated weekly Order Reminders have been proven to drive up to a 30%+ increase in average order volume.
Manage the Books
The more orders you accumulate, the more your financial books will need to be managed by a professional (accountant/bookkeeper). Receipts for Farm income may come in the form of cash, check, credit, debit, ACH, or pre-purchases. Additionally, there are several nuances for handling delivery fees, shipping costs, refunds, processing fees, and taxes! Using a spreadsheet to keep track of these manually is prone to error and takes too much time.
The most successful Farmers on Barn2Door leverage the Barn2Door + Quickbooks integration to seamlessly capture all their data in aggregate, posted automatically during a monthly sync by credit and debit category for your accountant/bookkeeper to reconcile. These Farmers benefit from expense management tools available in Quickbooks (e.g., payroll, vendors, and inputs), plus consolidated financial reporting tools like profit and loss, income statements, and balance sheets. It’s easy to have peace of mind when your finances are in order!
Filing Accurate Taxes
Did you know many states have tax codes that can vary from county to county, city to city, and may even be different from street to street (Colorado!)? Tax laws can get complicated fast! Successful Farmers use the Barn2Door + Avalara integration to ensure taxes are accurately calculated, collected at the proper rates, and timely remitted to the proper authorities! Depending on the diversity of your Farm products and operations, Avalara can automate the heavy work of calculating tax rates – simplifying the process and saving Farmers hours of time (while guaranteeing tax compliance).
If you’re ambivalent about using third-party solutions or have no desire to grow your Farm business, remember to always put a dollar value on your time.
At Barn2Door, we serve 1000’s of Farmers, many of whom have been cautious about leveraging the above business tools. However, when push came to shove, the most successful Farms on Barn2Door have built thriving businesses by leveraging these best-in-class solutions to streamline their operations, increase sales, and save time.
Barn2Door provides an all-in-one solution to grow and manage your Farm business. If you’re curious to learn why successful Farms run on Barn2Door, watch this 5-minute video.