A new mobile device and desktop app designed to streamline farm and contractor team administration is making record-keeping for the farming cousins who created it a whole lot easier.

Yokit replaces hand-written timesheets, holiday forms and vital invoicing information with one simple digital system for the whole team, with operators logging jobs as they go.

See also: Omnia introduces new functionality for recording SFI actions

Managers can then see live costs and generate invoices for work completed, and the data feeds into detailed reports that can be created to assess fuel efficiency, equipment hours and labour costs, providing an up-to-the-minute picture of a farm’s performance.

Integration with the most common accounting software used on farms allows invoices for customers to be generated in seconds.

© Yokit

Replacing pen and paper

“Farming has adopted all kinds of advanced precision technology, but so many farm offices are run with pens, paper and guesswork,” said John Fairlie, who farms in Angus.

“Yokit pulls everything together in one secure place.

“With each job entered helping build a live picture of what’s happening across the business, you can see where time and money are going, and you can make decisions based on facts rather than your memory.”

Each entry from an operator or member of staff captures parameters such as fuel use, area covered and equipment used.

“In one instance,” James Fairlie recalled, “we had two ploughs doing the same job, but one tractor was using six litres of fuel per hectare more than the other.

“A quick tweak of the settings fixed it and that was money straight back in the business.”

Ease of use was a key requirement of the design, which has been tested over several years on the cousins’ two farms, with drop-down fields aiming to avoid typing errors.

After a 90-day free trial, the system is available on four price-band subscriptions from £25/month for up to two team members to £150/month for a crew of 11 to 25 people.