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Rivers, MB | A question for those of you that don't pay your own farm bills or do the paperwork for your farm. As in your wife, partner, hired book-keeper does this.
How do you train this person to look through bills and grain cheques thoroughly enough to pick up on mistakes??? Or set up a system a system in place that makes it easy for them to find the mistakes.
For example, dockage or grade discrepancies on grain cheques. Trucking premiums missed. Incorrect pricing from a retailer on fertilizer or chemical. Double billing of parts/supplies or mileage at the service department at the machinery dealer. There seems to be a whole host of issues that just happen with any business that's out there. Mistakes happen. We make them too. But how do you train someone that is just in the office paying bills and not actually making stuff happen on the farm to know what is happening well enough to catch mistakes of others.
I farm together with my brother and my dad who is in the slowing down/learning to retire phase. By our skills and interests, I've become the office guy. My brother is the shop guy. Both of us do field operations. But the buck stops with me regarding anything in the office. I've sometimes thought of hiring someone to pay bills, answer mail, file, do deposits etc. But I'm amazed how often I find mistakes that add up to significant $'s. Maybe not significant as a % of our farm's costs but when I find mulitiple $1000's per year in mistakes, I figure that's significant in total $'s.
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question for those that have someone else pay bills/do office work for the farm
