Armstrong Watson is proud to announce a strategic partnership with Figured, the leading financial software company in the agricultural sector; a key addition to their cloud accounting proposition. Armstrong Watson are positioned as Agri and Farming sector leaders with offices throughout Cumbria, the North East, Scotland and Yorkshire. Armstrong Watson is recognised as a leading Xero Platinum Partner being awarded Xero Partner of the Year 2017.
This new partnership with New Zealand founded technology firm, Figured, sees Armstrong Watson further strengthen its’ cloud accounting and business advisory services for farmers. This latest addition to our services ensures that they continue to be a progressive, forward thinking firm with a continued focus and drive for innovation and execution excellence for their clients. This partnership is the culmination of a journey that started back in 2016 when the accounting leadership team from Armstrong Watson visited Australia to research the world’s leading cloud accountancy market.
Figured is designed to take the stress and frustration out of financial planning and management for farmers. Figured achieves this by combining up to date farm production data with real-time transactional data on a cloud based platform to provide an accurate view of a farm's financial position, both current and forecast. Being cloud-based and integrated with Xero, one of the UKs biggest cloud accounting software providers, means that farmers and their advisers can work together collaboratively as one team, look at the same figures and proactively work on the financial health of the farm business.
Andrew Robinson, partner and head of Armstrong Watson’s farming & agricultural sector has been working alongside Figured collaborating and advising on the UK farming market, speaking about the announcement said:
“Figured is an App which works with Xero, the UK’s leading cloud accountancy software, to provide an efficient farm management, budgeting and monitoring tool. The initial meetings and testing of the product have gone very well and we are confident our clients will very quickly see the benefits saving them time, energy and money. We are confident that using Figured software will help us give even more proactive advice and keep us ahead of the competition in terms of being leading farming accountants and business advisers for our regions.”
“The scale and deployment of Figured means we can see the value of live farming data enabling effective Budgeting, Forecasting and Benchmarking while at the same time supports and links to financial reporting. It will also track crop & livestock movements, operating expenses, see overall profit and future cash flow, enabling decision making based on a true picture of farm performance.”
“The role of accountants has been changing for some time. Businesses and in particular those working in the farming & agricultural sector, now require trusted business advisers who can take a broader view of their clients operations and want to work with a firm with whom they can build long term relationships and who understand their business as it evolves. Figured allows us to simply and collaboratively forecast different scenarios for the next five years, key in a period of such economic uncertainty, to achieve our clients’ business goals.”
He went on to say: “This is a very exciting partnership. As business advisers, we need to ensure that we are delivering the very best solutions for our clients and cloud technology is at the forefront of that, particularly with HMRC’s Making Tax Digital on the horizon April 2019. As traditional farming businesses develop and diversify, it means that we, as trusted advisers, need to help our clients keep on top of their finances at all times. Using software like Figured enables us to start client conversations earlier as we identify any issues or opportunities and deal with them faster and more efficiently.”
Toby Woodhead, Solution Architect for Armstrong Watson, discussing the adoption of the Figured said:
“The challenge with any large scale implementation of a technology platform is managing the change for both the clients and the accountants. Figured have demonstrated their commitment to ensuring a successful project through their willingness to listen to our client’s requirements and find solutions to meet those challenges. Their dedicated partner support team bring their extensive knowledge of farmers and finance from across the globe to ensure that we get our teams up to speed as soon as possible delivering value to our client.”
For further information about how cloud accounting software can help your agricultural business please get in touch with Andrew Robinson.
