The Focus Blog
To mark 45 years in business, our Head of Product, Sally Rutherford, reflects on the journey from CashManager RURAL to Farm Focus.
When I joined CashManager RURAL in 2015 as a product owner, Farm Focus was just an idea. We knew the future was in the cloud and I came on board to help build it.
CashManager RURAL was widely used and genuinely loved but it was reaching its limits. The product ran solely on Windows PC’s with data synced to the cloud and it was restricted to only the computer it was installed on. There were usability restrictions meaning customers couldn’t have two tabs open at once and one person could lock another out just by forgetting to log out. Most data was entered by hand or through CSV imports with only a handful of bank and supplier feeds. And change was slow with updates only happening a few times a year with customers required to download these from our website.
As more software providers moved fully to the cloud, we knew CashManager RURAL’s days were numbered.
In 2022 we had launched Farm Focus and began moving customers on to the new experience. It wasn’t easy. Many people had used CashManager RURAL for years and found the change was unsettling. Our customer support team had plenty of tough conversations, reassuring customers that they would still get the same value, just from a different software tool. We heard some honest feedback and we iterated fast to respond to this. At the same time our competitors were making a lot of noise in the market. Customer support and product development worked side by side through some stressful times and that relationship is still one of our strengths.
Our many loyal customers stuck with us. We took their feedback on the chin and used it to shape Farm Focus. Nothing like a few home truths and some healthy competition to sharpen the focus! We kept the end goal in sight; helping customers spend less time on data entry and more time analysing their results, making good decisions that matter now and in the future. Good farm decisions rarely happen alone. Accountants, bankers and consultants play a vital role and Farm Focus is built to work as well for them as it does for our farmers.
Since then the team has delivered a huge amount of work. It’s impossible to list everything but some of the highlights include automated data feeds, AI coding, quick matching and a paperless office. Farm Assistant answers customers’ questions about their data so they don’t have to go looking for it andAI is helping find and fix livestock errors. Customers can click on a line amount on a report and go straight to the underlying invoice or transaction. Budgeting is made easy by starting with last year’s Actuals and amending from there. Often it’s the smallest things that bring the most delight, like saving an invoice as an attachment just by taking a photo.
There’s more to come. AI will check customers’ data for anything unusual and flag it for review instead of trawling through the numbers themselves. Key insights will be waiting for customers when they log in so the answers come to them instead of having to go look. We’ll keep using AI to solve our customers’ problems faster and better so everyone gets even more value from Farm Focus. Having watched the product come this far, I’m excited about what’s possible now.
This constant reinvention goes back to the start. When Ian Campbell founded the business in 1981, the whole program fitted on a disk. Years later Brian Eccles, our former CEO, summed it up for me; the technology keeps changing but our purpose stays the same.
We’re here to help farmers. 45 years on, that’s still true.
