Lisa Stevenson and her family contract milk in the Wairarapa, at Kokotau near Carterton. When we filmed with her, they were milking 1,000 cows there and another 500 at Rangitumau, north of Masterton. Lisa runs the farm office from home, and Farm Focus is where she does the accounts and the GST returns.
“Within the office and in the home environment, when I’m doing the accounts and GST returns, we use Farm Focus.”
How do you get started with farm accounting software?
Lisa didn’t have to work it out alone. One phone call to the team, and she was shown how everything worked, on her own computer.
“When I first started using it, I rang the Farm Focus team and they used TeamViewer to plug into my computer, and over the phone we could just chat. They could show me via the screen, and me watching how to do everything, and that was just brilliant.”
Every Farm Focus customer still gets free onboarding and phone support from a team that knows farming, in New Zealand and Australia.
Why choose accounting software made for farms?
For Lisa, the difference is that Farm Focus is built around farming from the start. The farm codes are already there, and the people on the other end of the phone know what a farm transaction looks like.
“It’s better than, I believe, a lot of other systems, purely because it is so farm focused. Really, all the codes are set up there for you.”
“The people in the office know about farming, so it’s easy to chat to them about what’s happening, and they know what certain things are in transactions, so they know how to code things as well.”
Software that keeps improving
Lisa has seen Farm Focus change and grow while she’s used it.
“I think Farm Focus, over the four years that we’ve been with them, they are constantly evolving and developing new things within Farm Focus to make it better.”
That’s still true today. Lisa now works across three Farm Focus files: her own family business and the two family dairy farms, at Kokotau and Rangitumau. Her bank feed brings in transactions automatically, the Invoice Scanner handles the bills, and her Fonterra/Farm Source and Farmlands accounts are connected, so the information goes straight into Farm Focus. She keeps a working budget in Farm Focus, and GST is filed every two months from the same numbers. The accountant and the bank manager can log in and see the same up-to-date figures. Since July 2026, she can also ask the AI Farm Assistant quick questions about her actuals, plans and reports.
How does Farm Focus compare?
“From what I’ve seen of other products, Farm Focus offers just as much, if not more, particularly from a farming sense anyway.”
