Taihape dry stock farmer Tom Platts purchased Cash Manager Focus (CMF) to simplify farm management processes and, more importantly, to cut down on time spent in the office.   

“To be honest I wanted an application that did the hard yards for me – had to be user friendly and easy to operate all of which meant I spent less time in the office, and more time out doing stuff on the farm. CMF ticked those boxes. 

Tom and wife Claire farm ‘Colenso’ – 800h of medium to steep country around 50 minutes east of Taihape. 

“We are fairly high up here – farm from 600m up to around 900m and there’s often snow on the tops in the winter. It’s good clean country and stock do well.”  

Tom did not take a straight line into farming. He graduated as a Civil Engineer from Canterbury University before heading off on an extended OE, spending a few years working in the UK and travelling through Europe. He then moved to Canada and spent the next five years in Vancouver and, during this time, made a career change into IT contracting  

He says this change provided him with a good level of management experience before returning home to the family farm. 

“Having been an IT consultant I was used to sorting out customers problems and when I got home, and took over the financials, I could see we needed to simplify things, move to the next level with the way we did things. My parents had managed well by preparing the paperwork and then taking it down to our accountant to finalise. 

“I knew there were systems out there that would do the job more efficiently and had a good look around before purchasing CMF late last year. I wanted a farm management package that would simplify processes allowing me to spend more time on other stuff.” 

Tom says CMF ticked the boxes and was simple to set up  – “it’s pretty intuitive and straight forward compared to some accounting software, plus if you run into problems the CRS Support Team are there to help.” 

He says having control over coding, as in being able to use your own codes, has been a help as everyone is familiar with their own code names. “I haven’t got into the automated invoice scanning option yet but intend to. Coding takes time and if you can do it far quicker then that’s for me.