Through feeds showing all farm outputs and inputs, it enabled farm owners, managers, advisors and bankers to be literally be on the same page "to identify problems and cut them off at the knees before they develop".
Agriculture was the only roadshow stream "that actively dived into a segment of the market".
"The rest were higher-level on how to use Xero or marketing.
"Because agriculture is a particular industry that requires a particular accountant, we had a separate stream dedicated to that and yesterday we were going over some of the recent releases for that product."
Figured has evolved its Xero interface over four years.
"It is an agri-specific software that has all of the agri-specific needs that you would want."
Pooled data for benchmarking made it "incredibly powerful".
"With real-time benchmarking you can say, 'Why am I looking to spend 20 per cent more on animal health than the average for the same-system farm in my region?'"
Benchmarking would be "good honest data" from anonymous businesses that opted to share.
"There is no benefit for distorting your own figures. It is your own individual people coding data that will then get sucked into an aggregator."
He said while many farms had a budget agreed with their banks it was often "a bit of paper that is put in the bottom drawer", with only 10 to 20 per cent of farms "actively budgeting" so the end of the financial year wasn't the only time for balancing the books.
Figured was also good for forecasting, thanks to a recently-released tool.
"You can run scenarios and see if they are financially viable. So if you want to buy your neighbours farm you just put the data into this tool and it will come up with metrics on if it's a viable option or not.
"It doesn't take too long to process, so it is enabling better conversations around how your ideas might impact your business."
