How to get your clients through their emissions report

The slowest part of a client’s emissions report happens before they open the platform. Fuel receipts are in one place and fertiliser invoices in another, some of the figures are held by the accountant, and others live in someone else’s system. Once a producer is sitting down to enter them, that part moves along fine, and producers describe it as the easy bit. In the conversations we have, finding the figures comes up almost every time as what slows them down, and anything that shortens the hunt matters more than it usually gets credit for. We are watching that closely as the platform develops.

If you are in the advisor network, you are well placed to take some of that burden off a client. You can draft a good part of their report from what you already hold on file and then bring them in to check it, so they are reviewing a draft in place of starting cold. On Ruminati the client owns the data and decides your access to it, which is worth saying early.

A draft in hand does not finish the report on its own, because the other thing that decides it is where the report sits in the client’s year. When it is talked about next to tax time, or folded into the annual conversation with the bank or the accountant, it usually gets finished without much fuss. When it is set up as its own project with its own appointment and its own explanation, it can sit half done for six months, even though the figures going in are the same either way.

That framing needs repeating in place of being settled once, because the moment comes round again. A figure turns out not to be to hand or a total comes back higher than the client expected, and then a year rolls round and they decide whether it is worth doing again. Each time, the client is reminded either that the report belongs with their normal admin or that it stands apart from it. Keeping it in the first position gets you a good deal further than trying to talk anyone out of being nervous about the figure itself.

Those two things, the data hunting and where the report sits in the year, decide most of whether a report is finished, and the platform is rarely where one stalls. If you are not in the advisor network yet and want to see what setting up involves, email the team at hello@ruminati.com.au.